Nowadays, coronavirus (COVID-19) is getting international attention due it considered as a life-threatened epidemic disease that hard to control the spread of infection around the world. Machine learning (ML) is one of intelligent technique that able to automatically predict the event with reasonable accuracy based on the experience and learning process. In the meantime, a rapid number of ML models have been proposed for predicate the cases of COVID-19. Thus, there is need for an evaluation and benchmarking of COVID-19 ML models which considered the main challenge of this study. Furthermore, there is no single study have addressed the problem of evaluation and benchmarking of COVID diagnosis models. However, this study proposed an intelligent methodology is to help the health organisations in the selection COVID-19 diagnosis system. The benchmarking and evaluation of diagnostic models for COVID-19 is not a trivial process. There are multiple criteria requires to evaluate and some of the criteria are conflicting with each other. Our study is formulated as a decision matrix (DM) that embedded mix of ten evaluation criteria and twelve diagnostic models for COVID-19. The multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method is employed to evaluate and benchmarking the different diagnostic models for COVID19 with respect to the evaluation criteria. An integrated MCDM method are proposed where TOPSIS applied for the benchmarking and ranking purpose while Entropy used to calculate the weights of criteria. The study results revealed that the benchmarking and selection problems associated with COVID19 diagnosis models can be effectively solved using the integration of Entropy and TOPSIS. The SVM (linear) classifier is selected as the best diagnosis model for COVID19 with the closeness coefficient value of 0.9899 for our case study data. Furthermore, the proposed methodology has solved the significant variance for each criterion in terms of ideal best and worst best value, beside issue when specific diagnosis models have same ideal best value. INDEX TERMS COVID19 diagnostic, machine learning, benchmarking methodology, chest X-rays images, entropy, TOPSIS, multi-criteria decision-making. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Zheng Xiao .

The outbreaks of Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic have increased the pressure on healthcare and medical systems worldwide. The timely diagnosis of infected patients is a critical step to limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. The chest radiography imaging has shown to be an effective screening technique in diagnosing the COVID-19 epidemic. To reduce the pressure on radiologists and control of the epidemic, fast and accurate a hybrid deep learning framework for diagnosing COVID-19 virus in chest X-ray images is developed and termed as the COVID-CheXNet system. First, the contrast of the X-ray image was enhanced and the noise level was reduced using the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization and Butterworth bandpass filter, respectively. This was followed by fusing the results obtained from two different pre-trained deep learning models based on the incorporation of a ResNet34 and high-resolution network model trained using a large-scale dataset. Herein, the parallel architecture was considered, which provides radiologists with a high degree of confidence to discriminate between the healthy and COVID-19 infected people. The proposed COVID-CheXNet system has managed to correctly and accurately diagnose the COVID-19 patients with a detection accuracy rate of 99.99%, sensitivity of 99.98%, specificity of 100%, precision of 100%, F1-score of 99.99%, MSE of 0.011%, and RMSE of 0.012% using the weighted sum rule at the score-level. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed COVID-CheXNet system are established along with the possibility of using it in real clinical centers for fast diagnosis and treatment supplement, with less than 2 s per image to get the prediction result. Keywords Coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic Á Deep learning Á Transfer learning Á ResNet34 model Á Chest radiography imaging Á Chest X-ray images Communicated by Valentina E. Balas.

Hyper-heuristics are emerging methodologies that perform a search over the space of heuristics in an attempt to solve difficult computational optimization problems. We present a learning selection choice function based hyper-heuristic to solve multi-objective optimization problems. This high level approach controls and combines the strengths of three well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (i.e. NSGAII, SPEA2 and MOGA), utilizing them as the low level heuristics. The performance of the proposed learning hyper-heuristic is investigated on the Walking Fish Group test suite which is a common benchmark for multi-objective optimization. Additionally, the proposed hyper-heuristic is applied to the vehicle crashworthiness design problem as a real-world multi-objective problem. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the hyper-heuristic approach when compared to the performance of each low level heuristic run on its own, as well as being compared to other approaches including an adaptive multi-method search, namely AMALGAM.

Voice pathology disorders can be effectively detected using computer-aided voice pathology classification tools. These tools can diagnose voice pathologies at an early stage and offering appropriate treatment. This study aims to develop a powerful feature extraction voice pathology detection tool based on Deep Learning. In this paper, a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was applied to a dataset of voice pathology to maximize the classification accuracy. This study also proposes a distinguished training method combined with various training strategies in order to generalize the application of the proposed system on a wide range of problems related to voice disorders. The proposed system has tested using a voice database, namely the Saarbrücken voice database (SVD). The experimental results show the proposed CNN method for speech pathology detection achieves accuracy up to 95.41%. It also obtains 94.22% and 96.13% for F1-Score and Recall. The proposed system shows a high capability of the real-clinical application that offering a fast-automatic diagnosis and treatment solutions within 3 s to achieve the classification accuracy.

During the last years, water quality has been threatened by various pollutants. Therefore, modeling and predicting water quality have become very important in controlling water pollution. In this work, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are developed to predict water quality index (WQI) and water quality classification (WQC). For the WQI prediction, artificial neural network models, namely nonlinear autoregressive neural network (NARNET) and long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning algorithm, have been developed. In addition, three machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machine (SVM), K -nearest neighbor (K-NN), and Naive Bayes, have been used for the WQC forecasting. The used dataset has 7 significant parameters, and the developed models were evaluated based on some statistical parameters. The results revealed that the proposed models can accurately predict WQI and classify the water quality according to superior robustness. Prediction results demonstrated that the NARNET model performed slightly better than the LSTM for the prediction of the WQI values and the SVM algorithm has achieved the highest accuracy (97.01%) for the WQC prediction. Furthermore, the NARNET and LSTM models have achieved similar accuracy for the testing phase with a slight difference in the regression coefficient ( RNARNET = 96.17 % and RLSTM = 94.21 % ). This kind of promising research can contribute significantly to water management.