Olive cultivation over the past few years has spread across Mediterranean countries with Spain being the world’s largest olive producer among them. Because olives are a major part of the economy for such countries keeping records of their tree count and crop yield is of high significance. Manual counting of trees over such large areas is humanly infeasible. To address this problem, we propose an automatic method for the detection and enumeration of olive trees. The algorithm is a multi-step classification system comprising pre-processing, image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. RGB satellite images were acquired from the Spanish territory and pre-processed to suppress the additive noise. The region of interest was then segmented from the pre-processed images using K-Means segmentation, through which statistical features were extracted and classified. Promising results were achieved for all classifiers, namely Naive Bayesian, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Random Forest and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), at various division ratios of data samples. In a comparison of all the classification algorithms, Random Forest outperformed the rest by an overall accuracy of 97.5% at the division ratio of 70 to 30 for training to testing.

Knowledge-based decision support systems for financial management are an important part of investment plans. Investors are avoiding investing in traditional investment areas such as banks due to low return on investment. The stock exchange is one of the major areas for investment presently. Various non-linear and complex factors affect the stock exchange. A robust stock exchange forecasting system remains an important need. From this line of research, we evaluate the performance of a regression-based model to check the robustness over large datasets. We also evaluate the effect of top stock exchange markets on each other. We evaluate our proposed model on the top 4 stock exchanges—New York, London, NASDAQ and Karachi stock exchange. We also evaluate our model on the top 3 companies—Apple, Microsoft, and Google. A huge (Big Data) historical data is gathered from Yahoo finance consisting of 20 years. Such huge data creates a Big Data problem. The performance of our system is evaluated on a 1-step, 6-step, and 12-step forecast. The experiments show that the proposed system produces excellent results. The results are presented in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).