COVID‐19 is the disease evoked by a new breed of coronavirus called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2). Recently, COVID‐19 has become a pandemic by infecting more than 152 million people in over 216 countries and territories. The exponential increase in the number of infections has rendered traditional diagnosis techniques inefficient. Therefore, many researchers have developed several intelligent techniques, such as deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), which can assist the healthcare sector in providing quick and precise COVID‐19 diagnosis. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the most recent DL and ML techniques for COVID‐19 diagnosis. The studies are published from December 2019 until April 2021. In general, this paper includes more than 200 studies that have been carefully selected from several publishers, such as IEEE, Springer and Elsevier. We classify the research tracks into two categories: DL and ML and present COVID‐19 public datasets established and extracted from different countries. The measures used to evaluate diagnosis methods are comparatively analysed and proper discussion is provided. In conclusion, for COVID‐19 diagnosing and outbreak prediction, SVM is the most widely used machine learning mechanism, and CNN is the most widely used deep learning mechanism. Accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are the most widely used measurements in previous studies. Finally, this review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of machine learning for COVID‐19 and inspire their works for future development. This review paper will guide the research community on the upcoming development of ML and DL for COVID‐19 and inspire their works for future development.

Background. The most common and successful technique for signal denoising with non-stationary signals, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) is the wavelet transform (WT). The success of WT depends on the optimal configuration of its control parameters which are often experimentally set. Fortunately, the optimality of the combination of these parameters can be measured in advance by using the mean squared error (MSE) function. Method. In this paper, five powerful metaheuristic algorithms are proposed to find the optimal WT parameters for EEG signal denoising which are harmony search (HS), β-hill climbing (β-hc), particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), and flower pollination algorithm (FPA). It is worth mentioning that this is the initial investigation of using optimization methods for WT parameter configuration. This paper then examines which efficient algorithm has obtained the minimum MSE and the best WT parameter configurations. Result. The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested using two standard EEG datasets, namely, Kiern’s EEG dataset and EEG Motor Movement/Imagery dataset. The results of the proposed algorithms are evaluated using five common criteria: signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), SNR improvement, mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE), and percentage root mean square difference (PRD). Interestingly, for almost all evaluating criteria, FPA achieves the best parameters configuration for WT and empowers this technique to efficiently denoise the EEG signals for almost all used datasets. To further validate the FPA results, a comparative study between the FPA results and the results of two previous studies is conducted, and the findings favor to FPA. Conclusion. In conclusion, the results show that the proposed methods for EEG signal denoising can produce better results than manual configurations based on ad hoc strategy. Therefore, using metaheuristic approaches to optimize the parameters for EEG signals positively affects the denoising process performance of the WT method.

Feature selection (FS) constitutes a series of processes used to decide which relevant features/attributes to include and which irrelevant features to exclude for predictive modeling. It is a crucial task that aids machine learning classifiers in reducing error rates, computation time, overfitting, and improving classification accuracy. It has demonstrated its efficacy in myriads of domains, ranging from its use for text classification (TC), text mining, and image recognition. While there are many traditional FS methods, recent research efforts have been devoted to applying metaheuristic algorithms as FS techniques for the TC task. However, there are few literature reviews concerning TC. Therefore, a comprehensive overview was systematically studied by exploring available studies of different metaheuristic algorithms used for FS to improve TC. This paper will contribute to the body of existing knowledge by answering four research questions (RQs): 1) What are the different approaches of FS that apply metaheuristic algorithms to improve TC? 2) Does applying metaheuristic algorithms for TC lead to better accuracy than the typical FS methods? 3) How effective are the modified, hybridized metaheuristic algorithms for text FS problems?, and 4) What are the gaps in the current studies and their future directions? These RQs led to a study of recent works on metaheuristic-based FS methods, their contributions, and limitations. Hence, a final list of thirty-seven (37) related articles was extracted and investigated to align with our RQs to generate new knowledge in the domain of study. Most of the conducted papers focused on addressing the TC in tandem with metaheuristic algorithms based on the wrapper and hybrid FS approaches. Future research should focus on using a hybrid-based FS approach as it intuitively handles complex optimization problems and potentiality provide new research opportunities in this rapidly developing field.

The Lemur Optimizer (LO) is a novel nature-inspired algorithm we propose in this paper. This algorithm’s primary inspirations are based on two pillars of lemur behavior: leap up and dance hub. These two principles are mathematically modeled in the optimization context to handle local search, exploitation, and exploration search concepts. The LO is first benchmarked on twenty-three standard optimization functions. Additionally, the LO is used to solve three real-world problems to evaluate its performance and effectiveness. In this direction, LO is compared to six well-known algorithms: Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Bat Algorithm (BA), Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA), and JAYA algorithm. The findings show that the proposed algorithm outperforms these algorithms in fourteen standard optimization functions and proves the LO’s robust performance in managing its exploration and exploitation capabilities, which significantly leads LO towards the global optimum. The real-world experimental findings demonstrate how LO may tackle such challenges competitively.