Among the metaheuristic algorithms, population-based algorithms are an explorative search algorithm superior to the local search algorithm in terms of exploring the search space to find globally optimal solutions. However, the primary downside of such algorithms is their low exploitative capability, which prevents the expansion of the search space neighborhood for more optimal solutions. The firefly algorithm (FA) is a population-based algorithm that has been widely used in clustering problems. However, FA is limited in terms of its premature convergence when no neighborhood search strategies are employed to improve the quality of clustering solutions in the neighborhood region and exploring the global regions in the search space. On the

In data mining, classification is a form of data analysis that can be used to extract models describing important data classes. Two of the well known algorithms used in data mining classification are Backpropagation Neural Network (BNN) and Naïve Bayesian (NB). This paper investigates the performance of these two classification methods using the Car Evaluation dataset. Two models were built for both algorithms and the results were compared. Our experimental results indicated that the BNN classifier yield higher accuracy as compared to the NB classifier but it is less efficient because it is time-consuming and difficult to analyze due to its black-box implementation.

In this study, we made a comparison between LASSO & SCAD methods, which are two special methods for dealing with models in partial quantile regression. (Nadaraya & Watson Kernel) was used to estimate the non-parametric part ;in addition, the rule of thumb method was used to estimate the smoothing bandwidth (h). Penalty methods proved to be efficient in estimating the regression coefficients, but the SCAD method according to the mean squared error criterion (MSE) was the best after estimating the missing data using the mean imputation method

Higher education is one of the foundational pillars that contributes to the development of societies and the achievement of social and economic progress. With the accelerating advancements in technological, environmental, and social fields, universities and educational institutions worldwide are facing significant challenges requiring them to adapt to these changes and develop new educational strategies. In this context, directing higher education towards achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) has become imperative, as these goals are now an integral part of modern societies' vision, particularly in light of global challenges such as climate change, population growth, and unemployment. By the year 2050, educational institutions

Arab Food's Security

In the current Windows version (Vista), as in all previous versions, creating a user account without setting a password is possible. For a personal PC this might be without too much risk, although it is not recommended, even by Microsoft itself. However, for business computers it is necessary to restrict access to the computers, starting with defining a different password for every user account. For the earlier versions of Windows, a lot of resources can be found giving advice how to construct passwords of user accounts. In some extent they contain remarks concerning the suitability of their solution for Windows Vista. But all these resources are not very precise about what kind of passwords the user must use. To assess the protection of pa

Different ANN architectures of MLP have been trained by BP and used to analyze Landsat TM images. Two different approaches have been applied for training: an ordinary approach (for one hidden layer M-H1-L & two hidden layers M-H1-H2-L) and one-against-all strategy (for one hidden layer (M-H1-1)xL, & two hidden layers (M-H1-H2-1)xL). Classification accuracy up to 90% has been achieved using one-against-all strategy with two hidden layers architecture. The performance of one-against-all approach is slightly better than the ordinary approach