Customers are prominent resources in every business for its sustainability. Therefore, predicting customer churn is significant for reducing churn, particularly in the high-churn-rate telecommunications business. To identify customers at risk of churning, tactical marketing actions can be strategized to raise the likelihood of the churn-probable customers remaining as customers. This might provide a corporation with significant savings. Hence, in this work, a churn prediction system is developed to assist telecommunication operators in detecting potential churn customers. In the proposed framework, the input data quality is improved through the processes of exploratory data analysis and data preprocessing for identifying data errors and comprehending data patterns. Then, feature engineering and data sampling processes are performed to transform the captured data into an appropriate form for classification and imbalanced data handling. An optimized ensemble learning model is proposed for classification in this framework. Unlike other ensemble models, the proposed classification model is an optimized weighted soft voting ensemble with a sequence of weights applied to weigh the prediction of each base learner with the hypothesis that specific base learners in the ensemble have more skill than others. In this optimization, Powell’s optimization algorithm is applied to optimize the ensemble weights of influence according to the base learners’ importance. The efficiency of the proposed optimally weighted ensemble learning model is evaluated in a real-world database. The empirical results show that the proposed customer churn prediction system achieves a promising performance with an accuracy score of 84% and an F1 score of 83.42%. Existing customer churn prediction systems are studied. We achieved a higher prediction accuracy than the other systems, including machine learning and deep learning models.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are constantly under pressure to grow. This pressure forces everyone involved to think about how best to run their business. Although there is much research on SME growth, previous research is fragmented and only addresses internal or external enablers. This study aims to construct an interaction model for all enablers that promote sustainable SME growth. An interpretive structural modeling (ISM) analysis is conducted to formulate an interaction model of enablers for SME growth. The results show that both internal and external enablers are crucial for SME growth. This study shows that the following internal enablers that are interrelated and strongly influence SME growth are MS (managerial skills), EO (entrepreneurial orientation), and OwS (ownership structure). In addition, external enablers such as CIL (customer involvement and location) and GS (government support) also play an important role in improving the performance of other factors for SME growth. In addition, this study also provides a guide for formulating strategies for SME sustainability. Effective policy formulation must be based on a correct understanding of the interdependence between enablers as a unified model of interaction. The interaction between the enablers highlighted and the level of the model would be helpful to all shareholders in finding appropriate strategies for SME growth.

The adoption of network flow in the domain of Network-based Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) has steadily risen in popularity. Typically, NIDS detects network intrusions by inspecting the contents of every packet. Flow-based approach, however, uses only features derived from aggregated packet headers. In this paper, all publicly accessible and labeled NIDS data sets are explored. Following the advances in deep learning techniques, the performances of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are also presented and compared with various machine learning classifiers. Amongst the reviewed data sets, the models are trained and evaluated on CIDDS-001 flow-based data set.

The land surface of Malaysia mostly constitutes forest cover. For decades, forest fires have been one of the nation’s most concerning environmental issues. With the advent of machine learning, many studies have been conducted to resolve forest fire issues. However, the findings and results have been very case-specific. Most experiments have focused on particular regions with independent methodology settings, which has hindered the ability of others to reproduce works. Another major challenge is lack of benchmark datasets in this domain, which has made benchmark comparisons almost impossible to conduct. To our best knowledge, no comprehensive review and analysis have been performed to streamline the research direction for forest fires in Malaysia. Hence, this paper was aimed to review all works aimed to combat forest fire issues in Malaysia from 1989 to 2021. With the proliferation of publicly accessible satellite data in recent years, a new direction of utilising big data platforms has been postulated. The merit of this approach is that the methodology and experiments can be reproduced. Thus, it is strongly believed that the findings and analysis shown in this paper will be useful as a baseline to propagate research in this domain.