Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with significant social, communication, and behavioral challenges. The insufficient number of trained clinicians coupled with limited accessibility to quick and accurate diagnostic tools resulted in overlooking early symptoms of ASD in children around the world. Several studies have utilized behavioral data in developing and evaluating the performance of machine learning (ML) models toward quick and intelligent ASD assessment systems. However, despite the good evaluation metrics achieved by the ML models, there is not enough evidence on the readiness of the models for clinical use. Specifically, none of the existing studies reported the real-life application of the ML-based models. This might be related to numerous challenges associated with the data-centric techniques utilized and their misalignment with the conceptual basis upon which professionals diagnose ASD. The present work systematically reviewed recent articles on the application of ML in the behavioral assessment of ASD, and highlighted common challenges in the studies, and proposed vital considerations for real-life implementation of ML-based ASD screening and diagnostic systems. This review will serve as a guide for researchers, neuropsychiatrists, psychologists, and relevant stakeholders on the advances in ASD screening and diagnosis using ML.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has produced a global pandemic, which has devastating effects on health, economy and social interactions. Despite the less contraction and spread of COVID-19 in Africa compared to some other continents in the world, Africa remains amongst the most vulnerable regions due to less technology and unequipped or poor health system. Recent happenings showed that COVID-19 may stay for years owing to the discoveries of new variants (such as Omicron) and new wave of infections in several countries. Therefore, accurate prediction of new cases is vital to make informed decisions and in evaluating the measures that should be implemented. Studies on COVID-19 prediction are limited in Africa despite the risks and dangers that the virus possessed. Hence, this study was performed to predict daily COVID-19 cases in 10 African countries spread across the north, south, east, west and central Africa considering countries with few and large number of daily COVID-19 cases. Machine learning (ML) models due to their nonlinearity and accurate prediction capabilities were employed for this purpose, including artificial neural network (ANN), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), support vector machine (SVM) and conventional multiple linear regression (MLR) models. As any other natural process, the COVID-19 pandemic may contain both linear and nonlinear aspects. In such circumstances, neither nonlinear (ML) nor linear (MLR) models could be sufficient; hence, combining both ML and MLR models may produce better accuracy. Consequently, to improve the prediction efficiency of the ML models, novel ensemble approaches including ANN-E and SVM-E were employed. The advantage of using ensemble approaches is that they provide collective benefits of all the standalone models, thereby reducing their weaknesses and enhancing their prediction capabilities. The obtained results showed that ANFIS led to better prediction performance with MAD = 0.0106, MSE = 0.0003, RMSE = 0.0185 and R 2 = 0.9059 in the validation step. The results of the proposed ensemble approaches demonstrated very high improvements in predicting the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa with MAD = 0.0073, MSE = 0.0002, RMSE = 0.0155 and R 2 = 0.9616. The ANN-E improved the standalone models performance in the validation step up to 10%, 14%, 42%, 6%, 83%, 11%, 7%, 5%, 7% and 31% for Morocco, Sudan, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Gabon and Cameroon, respectively. This study results offer a solid foundation in the application of ensemble approaches for predicting COVID-19 pandemic across all regions and countries in the world.

Vaccination is one of the strategies to contain a pandemic such as coronavirus disease 2019. Nigeria with the highest number of people in Africa has fully vaccinated only 3.69% of its citizens as of February 2022. This study aims to assess the level of Covid-19 vaccine acceptance. A cross-sectional survey was carried out by adopting a systematic random sampling sum of 220 primary school teachers in Dutse municipal (the capital of Jigawa state, Nigeria). Data was gathered between August 2021 and September 2021 through a self-administered questionnaire. A total of 220 primary school teachers participated in this survey, majority of them are married (85.9%) and are above the age of 36 (40.5%). Most of the respondents (47.3%) possessed national certificate of education (N.C.E) or national diploma (N.D). 85.5% of the general participants believed that; physical distancing, wearing of face mask and use of hand sanitizers can reduce the spread of the virus. Only 25.5% of the respondents are ready and willing to be vaccinated if it is available for them while the highest percentages of the participants (57.3) are not willing to take the vaccine and the remaining percentage are yet to decide. Similarly, 64.1% of the respondents believed that fear of side effect is one of the reasons why they are not willing to be vaccinated against the virus. Though, participants’ awareness about the pandemic is moderate but the low level of the vaccine acceptability is worrisome to the Jigawa state health authorities as well as Nigeria at large and should stir more efforts on the sensitization campaigns and strict measures.