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In this research, we propose a variant of the firefly algorithm (FA) for classifier ensemble reduction. It incorporates both accelerated attractiveness and evading strategies to overcome the premature convergence problem of the original FA model. The attractiveness strategy takes not only the neighbouring but also global best solutions into account, in order to guide the firefly swarm to reach the optimal regions with fast convergence while the evading action employs both neighbouring and global worst solutions to drive the search out of gloomy regions. The proposed algorithm is subsequently used to conduct discriminant base classifier selection for generating optimized ensemble classifiers without compromising classification accuracy. Evaluated with standard, shifted, and composite test functions, as well as the Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking test suite and several high dimensional UCI data sets, the empirical results indicate that, based on statistical tests, the proposed FA model outperforms other state-of-the-art FA variants and classical metaheuristic search methods in solving diverse complex unimodal and multimodal optimization and ensemble reduction problems. Moreover, the resulting ensemble classifiers show superior performance in comparison with those of the original, full-sized ensemble models.

This research proposes an intelligent decision support system for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia diagnosis from microscopic blood images. A novel clustering algorithm with stimulating discriminant measures (SDM) of both within- and between-cluster scatter variances is proposed to produce robust segmentation of nucleus and cytoplasm of lymphocytes/lymphoblasts. Specifically, the proposed between-cluster evaluation is formulated based on the trade-off of several between-cluster measures of well-known feature extraction methods. The SDM measures are used in conjuction with Genetic Algorithm for clustering nucleus, cytoplasm, and background regions. Subsequently, a total of eighty features consisting of shape, texture, and colour information of the nucleus and cytoplasm sub-images are extracted. A number of classifiers (multi-layer perceptron, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Dempster-Shafer ensemble) are employed for lymphocyte/lymphoblast classification. Evaluated with the ALL-IDB2 database, the proposed SDM-based clustering overcomes the shortcomings of Fuzzy C-means which focuses purely on within-cluster scatter variance. It also outperforms Linear Discriminant Analysis and Fuzzy Compactness and Separation for nucleus-cytoplasm separation. The overall system achieves superior recognition rates of 96.72% and 96.67% accuracies using bootstrapping and 10-fold cross validation with Dempster-Shafer and SVM, respectively. The results also compare favourably with those reported in the literature, indicating the usefulness of the proposed SDM-based clustering method.

Image analysis results showed that the effects of maspin were mirrored by effects on cell architecture, in a way that could be described quantitatively.

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