This study proposes a novel bioinspired metaheuristic simulating how the coronavirus spreads and infects healthy people. From a primary infected individual (patient zero), the coronavirus rapidly infects new victims, creating large populations of infected people who will either die or spread infection. Relevant terms such as reinfection probability, super-spreading rate, social distancing measures, or traveling rate are introduced into the model to simulate the coronavirus activity as accurately as possible. The infected population initially grows exponentially over time, but taking into consideration social isolation measures, the mortality rate, and number of recoveries, the infected population gradually decreases. The coronavirus optimization algorithm has two major advantages when compared with other similar strategies. First, the input parameters are already set according to the disease statistics, preventing researchers from initializing them with arbitrary values. Second, the approach has the ability to end after several iterations, without setting this value either. Furthermore, a parallel multivirus version is proposed, where several coronavirus strains evolve over time and explore wider search space areas in less iterations. Finally, the metaheuristic has been combined with deep learning models, to find optimal hyperparameters during the training phase. As application case, the problem of electricity load time series forecasting has been addressed, showing quite remarkable performance.

Analyzing microarray data represents a computational challenge due to the characteristics of these data. Clustering techniques are widely applied to create groups of genes that exhibit a similar behavior under the conditions tested. Biclustering emerges as an improvement of classical clustering since it relaxes the constraints for grouping genes to be evaluated only under a subset of the conditions and not under all of them. However, this technique is not appropriate for the analysis of longitudinal experiments in which the genes are evaluated under certain conditions at several time points. We present the TriGen algorithm, a genetic algorithm that finds triclusters of gene expression that take into account the experimental conditions and the time points simultaneously. We have used TriGen to mine datasets related to synthetic data, yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cell cycle and human inflammation and host response to injury experiments. TriGen has proved to be capable of extracting groups of genes with similar patterns in subsets of conditions and times, and these groups have shown to be related in terms of their functional annotations extracted from the Gene Ontology.

In this paper, we introduce a deep learning approach, based on feed-forward neural networks, for big data time series forecasting with arbitrary prediction horizons. We firstly propose a random search to tune the multiple hyper-parameters involved in the method perfor-mance. There is a twofold objective for this search: firstly, to improve the forecasts and, secondly, to decrease the learning time. Next, we pro-pose a procedure based on moving averages to smooth the predictions obtained by the different models considered for each value of the pre-diction horizon. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation using a real-world dataset composed of electricity consumption in Spain, evaluating accuracy and comparing the performance of the proposed deep learning with a grid search and a random search without applying smoothing. Reported results show that a random search produces competitive accu-racy results generating a smaller number of models, and the smoothing process reduces the forecasting error.

Microarrays have revolutionized biotechnological research. The analysis of new data generated represents a computational challenge due to the characteristics of these data. Clustering techniques are applied to create groups of genes that exhibit a similar behavior. Biclustering emerges as a valuable tool for microarray data analysis since it relaxes the constraints for grouping, allowing genes to be evaluated only under a subset of the conditions. However, if a third dimension appears in the data, triclustering is the appropriate tool for the analysis. This occurs in longitudinal experiments in which the genes are evaluated under conditions at several time points. All clustering, biclustering, and triclustering techniques guide their search for solutions by a measure that evaluates the quality of clusters. We present an evaluation measure for triclusters called Mean Square Residue 3D. This measure is based on the classic biclustering measure Mean Square Residue. Mean Square Residue 3D has been applied to both synthetic and real data and it has proved to be capable of extracting groups of genes with homogeneous patterns in subsets of conditions and times, and these groups have shown a high correlation level and they are also related to their functional annotations extracted from the Gene Ontology project.

A previous definition of seismogenic zones is required to do a probabilistic seismic hazard analysis for areas of spread and low seismic activity. Traditional zoning methods are based on the available seismic catalog and the geological structures. It is admitted that thermal and resistant parameters of the crust provide better criteria for zoning. Nonetheless, the working out of the rheological profiles causes a great uncertainty. This has generated inconsistencies, as different zones have been proposed for the same area. A new method for seismogenic zoning by means of triclustering is proposed in this research. The main advantage is that it is solely based on seismic data. Almost no human decision is made, and therefore, the method is nearly non-biased. To assess its performance, the method has been applied to the Iberian Peninsula, which is characterized by the occurrence of small to moderate magnitude earthquakes. The catalog of the National Geographic Institute of Spain has been used. The output map is checked for validity with the geology. Moreover, a Entropy 2015, 17 5001 geographic information system has been used for two purposes. First, the obtained zones have been depicted within it. Second, the data have been used to calculate the seismic parameters (b-value, annual rate). Finally, the results have been compared to Kohonen's self-organizing maps.