Yonis Gulzar

One of the most important tasks in handling real-world global optimization problems is to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation in any nature-inspired optimization method. As a result, the search agents of an algorithm constantly strive to investigate the unexplored regions of a search space. Aquila Optimizer (AO) is a recent addition to the field of metaheuristics that finds the solution to an optimization problem using the hunting behavior of Aquila. However, in some cases, AO skips the true solutions and is trapped at sub-optimal solutions. These problems lead to premature convergence (stagnation), which is harmful in determining the global optima. Therefore, to solve the above-mentioned problem, the present study aims to establish comparatively better synergy between exploration and exploitation and to escape from local stagnation in AO. In this direction, firstly, the exploration ability of AO is improved by integrating Dynamic Random Walk (DRW), and, secondly, the balance between exploration and exploitation is maintained through Dynamic Oppositional Learning (DOL). Due to its dynamic search space and low complexity, the DOL-inspired DRW technique is more computationally efficient and has higher exploration potential for convergence to the best optimum. This allows the algorithm to be improved even further and prevents premature convergence. The proposed algorithm is named DAO. A well-known set of CEC2017 and CEC2019 benchmark functions as well as three engineering problems are used for the performance evaluation. The superior ability of the proposed DAO is demonstrated by the examination of the numerical data produced and its comparison with existing metaheuristic algorithms.

Sunflower is an important crop that is susceptible to various diseases, which can significantly impact crop yield and quality. Early and accurate detection of these diseases is crucial for implementing appropriate management strategies. In recent years, deep learning techniques have shown promising results in the field of disease classification using image data. This study presents a comparative analysis of different deep-learning models for the classification of sunflower diseases. five widely used deep learning models, namely AlexNet, VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV3, and EfficientNet were trained and evaluated using a dataset of sunflower disease images. The performance of each model was measured in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated that all the deep learning models achieved high precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy values for sunflower disease classification. Among the models, EfficientNetB3 exhibited the highest precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy of 0.979. whereas the other models, ALexNet, VGG16, InceptionV3 and MobileNetV3 achieved 0.865, 0.965, 0.954 and 0.969 accuracy respectively. Based on the comparative analysis, it can be concluded that deep learning models are effective for the classification of sunflower diseases. The results highlight the potential of deep learning in early disease detection and classification, which can assist farmers and agronomists in implementing timely disease management strategies. Furthermore, the findings suggest that models like MobileNetV3 and EfficientNetB3 could be preferred choices due to their high performance and relatively fewer training epochs.

Real-world applications often involve imbalanced datasets, which have different distributions of examples across various classes. When building a system that requires a high accuracy, the performance of the classifiers is crucial. However, imbalanced datasets can lead to a poor classification performance and conventional techniques, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique. As a result, this study proposed a balance between the datasets using adversarial learning methods such as generative adversarial networks. The model evaluated the effect of data augmentation on both the balanced and imbalanced datasets. The study evaluated the classification performance on three different datasets and applied data augmentation techniques to generate the synthetic data for the minority class. Before the augmentation, a decision tree was applied to identify the classification accuracy of all three datasets. The obtained classification accuracies were 79.9%, 94.1%, and 72.6%. A decision tree was used to evaluate the performance of the data augmentation, and the results showed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 82.7%, 95.7%, and 76% on a highly imbalanced dataset. This study demonstrates the potential of using data augmentation to improve the classification performance in imbalanced datasets.