Deep neural networks (DNN) are a powerful tool that is used in many real-life applications. Solving complicated real-life problems requires deeper and larger networks, and hence, a larger number of parameters to optimize. This paper proposes a multilevel architecture of deep learning (MADL) that breaks down the optimization to different levels and steps where networks are trained and optimized separately. Two approaches of passing the features from level i to level i + 1 are discussed. The first approach uses the output layer of level i as input to level i + 1 and the second approach discusses introducing an additional fully connected layer to pass the features from it directly to the next level. The experimentations showed that the second approach, that is the use of the features in the additional fully connected layer, gives a higher improvement. The paper also discusses an advanced customizable activation function that is comparable in its performance to rectified linear unit (ReLU). MADL is experimented using CIFAR-10 and exhibited an improvement of 0.84% compared to a single network resulting in an accuracy of 98.04%.

Going online has created more opportunities for newspapers to present breaking news in a timely manner. Concentrating in spreading more bad news increases the feeling of danger and depression in the society. Some authors believe on tendency of some media to be focused on sharing the bad events in life rather than the good ones because of the impact and the attraction over the audience is more significant. Sentiment analysis work has not been recognized, proposed, or documented on Arabic news because of the challenges that Arabic raises as a language including the different Arabs' dialects and its complex grammatical structure. With the emerging flow of news that cause a global panic and anxiety worldwide, this study focuses on the serious need to identify what effective role could machine learning classifiers have in the early detection process of the psychology impact on the readers by the daily news headlines. In this work, a dataset of news headlines were gathered from top popular online Arabic news sites and were annotated to seven emotional categories: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. A convolutional neural network-based two-level approach was proposed for sentiment classification. The performance of the proposed approach was compared to six machine learning classifiers (zeroR, k-nearest neighbor, decision trees, naïve Bayes, random forest and Support vector machine) and showed better accuracy, precision, and recall.

Dates grading is a crucial stage in the dates' factories. However, it is done manually in most of the Middle Eastern industries. This study, using a novel dataset, identifies the suitable machine learning techniques to grade dates based on the image of the date. The dataset consists of three different types of dates, namely, Ajwah, Mabroom, and Sukkary with each having three different grades. The dates were obtained from Manafez company and graded by their experts. The color, size and texture of the dates are the features that have been considered in this work. To determine the color, we have used color properties in RGB (red, green, and blue) color space. For measuring the size, we applied the best least-square fitting ellipse. To analyze the texture, we used Weber local descriptor to distinguish between texture patterns. In order to identify the suitable grading classifier, we have experimented three approaches, namely, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural network (CNN). Our experiments have shown that CNN is the best classifier with an accuracy of 98% for Ajwah, 99% for Mabroom, and 99% for Sukkary. Hence, the CNN classifier has been incorporated in our date grading system.