Despite yielding considerable degrees of accuracy in landslide predictions, the outcomes of different landslide susceptibility models are prone to spatial disagreement; and therefore, uncertainties. Uncertainties in the results of various landslide susceptibility models create challenges in selecting the most suitable method to manage this complex natural phenomenon. This study aimed to propose an approach to reduce uncertainties in landslide prediction, diagnosing spatial agreement in machine learning-based landslide susceptibility maps. It first developed landslide susceptibility maps of Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh, applying four machine learning algorithms: K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM), featuring hyperparameter optimization of 12 landslide conditioning factors. The results of all the four models yielded very high prediction accuracy, with the area under the curve (AUC) values range between 0.93 to 0.96. The assessment of spatial agreement of landslide predictions showed that the pixel-wise correlation coefficients of landslide probability between various models range from 0.69 to 0.85, indicating the uncertainty in predicted landslides by various models, despite their considerable prediction accuracy. The uncertainty was addressed by establishing a Logistic Regression (LR) model, incorporating the binary landslide inventory data as the dependent variable and the results of the four landslide susceptibility models as independent variables. The outcomes indicated that the RF model had the highest influence in predicting the observed landslide locations, followed by the MLP, SVM, and KNN models. Finally, a combined landslide susceptibility map was developed by integrating the results of the four machine learning-based landslide predictions. The combined map resulted in better spatial agreement (correlation coefficients range between 0.88 and 0.92) and greater prediction accuracy (0.97) compared to the individual models. The modelling approach followed in this study would be useful in minimizing uncertainties of various methods and improving landslide predictions.

There is a perpetual elevation in demand for higher education in the last decade all over the world; therefore, the need for improving the education system is imminent. Educational data mining is a newly-visible area in the field of data mining and it can be applied to better understanding the educational systems in Bangladesh. In this research, we present how data can be preprocessed using a discretization method called the Optimal Equal Width Binning and an over-sampling technique known as the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling (SMOTE) to improve the accuracy of the students’ final grade prediction model for a particular course. In order to validate our method we have used data from a course offered at North South University, Bangladesh. The result obtained from the experiment gives a clear indication that the accuracy of the prediction model improves significantly when the discretization and over-sampling methods are applied.

Globally, many studies on machine learning (ML)-based flood susceptibility modeling have been carried out in recent years. While majority of those models produce reasonably accurate flood predictions, the outcomes are subject to uncertainty since flood susceptibility models (FSMs) may produce varying spatial predictions. However, there have not been many attempts to address these uncertainties because identifying spatial agreement in flood projections is a complex process. This study presents a framework for reducing spatial disagreement among four standalone and hybridized ML-based FSMs: random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and hybridized genetic algorithm-gaussian radial basis function-support vector regression (GA-RBF-SVR). Besides, an optimized model was developed combining the outcomes of those four models. The southwest coastal region of Bangladesh was selected as the case area. A comparable percentage of flood potential area (approximately 60% of the total land areas) was produced by all ML-based models. Despite achieving high prediction accuracy, spatial discrepancy in the model outcomes was observed, with pixel-wise correlation coefficients across different models ranging from 0.62 to 0.91. The optimized model exhibited high prediction accuracy and improved spatial agreement by reducing the number of classification errors. The framework presented in this study might aid in the formulation of risk-based development plans and enhancement of current early warning systems.

Financial fraud cases are on the rise even with the current technological advancements. Due to the lack of inter-organization synergy and because of privacy concerns, authentic financial transaction data is rarely available. On the other hand, data-driven technologies like machine learning need authentic data to perform precisely in real-world systems. This study proposes a blockchain and smart contract-based approach to achieve robust Machine Learning (ML) algorithm for e-commerce fraud detection by facilitating inter-organizational collaboration. The proposed method uses blockchain to secure the privacy of the data. Smart contract deployed inside the network fully automates the system. An ML model is incrementally upgraded from collaborative data provided by the organizations connected to the blockchain. To incentivize the organizations, we have introduced an incentive mechanism that is adaptive to the difficulty level in updating a model. The organizations receive incentives based on the difficulty faced in updating the ML model. A mining criterion has been proposed to mine the block efficiently. And finally, the blockchain network is tested under different difficulty levels and under different volumes of data to test its efficiency. The model achieved 98.93% testing accuracy and 98.22% Fbeta score (recall-biased f measure) over eight incremental updates. Our experiment shows that both data volume and difficulty level of blockchain impacts the mining time. For difficulty level less than five, mining time and difficulty level has a positive correlation. For difficulty level two and three, less than a second is required to mine a block in our system. Difficulty level five poses much more difficulties to mine the blocks.

Bangladesh is in the floodplains of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna River delta, crisscrossed by an intricate web of rivers. Although the country is highly prone to flooding, the use of state-of-the-art deep learning models in predicting river water levels to aid flood forecasting is underexplored. Deep learning and attention-based models have shown high potential for accurately forecasting floods over space and time. The present study aims to develop a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and its attention-based architectures to predict flood water levels in the rivers of Bangladesh. The models developed in this study incorporated gauge-based water level data over 7 days for flood prediction at Dhaka and Sylhet stations. This study developed five models: artificial neural network (ANN), LSTM, spatial attention LSTM (SALSTM), temporal attention LSTM (TALSTM), and spatiotemporal attention LSTM (STALSTM). The multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) method was applied to address missing data in the time series analysis. The results showed that the use of both spatial and temporal attention together increases the predictive performance of the LSTM model, which outperforms other attention-based LSTM models. The STALSTM-based flood forecasting system, developed in this study, could inform flood management plans to accurately predict floods in Bangladesh and elsewhere.