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Expert systems imitate professional experience and thinking process of a specialist to solve problems in various subject areas. An example of the problem that it is expedient to solve with the help of the expert system is the problem of forming a diagnosis that arises in technology, medicine, and other fields. When solving the diagnostic problem, it is necessary to anticipate the occurrence of critical or emergency situations in the future. They are situations, which require timely intervention of specialists to prevent critical aftermath. Fuzzy sets theory provides one of the approaches to solve ill-structured problems, diagnosis-making problems belong to which. The theory of fuzzy sets provides means for the formation of linguistic variables, which are helpful to describe the modeled process. Linguistic variables are elements of fuzzy logical rules that simulate the reasoning of professionals in the subject area. To develop fuzzy rules it is necessary to resort to a survey of experts. Knowledge engineers use experts’ opinion to evaluate correspondence between a typical current situation and the risk of emergency in the future. The result of knowledge extraction is a description of linguistic variables that includes a combination of signs. Experts are involved in the survey to create descriptions of linguistic variables and present a set of simulated situations.When building such systems, the main problem of the survey is laboriousness of the process of interaction of knowledge engineers with experts. The main reason is the multiplicity of questions the expert must answer. The paper represents reasoning of the method, which allows knowledge engineer to reduce the number of questions posed to the expert. The paper describes the experiments carried out to test the applicability of the proposed method. An expert system for predicting risk groups for neonatal pathologies and pregnancy pathologies using the proposed knowledge extraction method confirms the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Segmentation of medical image is one of the most challenging tasks in analysis of medical image. It classifies the organs pixels or lesions from medical images background like MRI or CT scans, that is to provide critical information about the human organ’s volumes and shapes. In scientific imaging field, medical imaging is considered one of the most important topics due to the rapid and continuing progress in computerized medical image visualization, advances in analysis approaches and computer-aided diagnosis. Digital image processing becomes more important in healthcare field due to the growing use of direct digital imaging systems for medical diagnostics. Due to medical imaging techniques, approaches of image processing are now applicable in medicine. Generally, various transformations will be needed to extract image data. Also, a digital image can be considered an approximation of a real situation includes some uncertainty derived from the constraints on the process of vision. Since information on the level of uncertainty will influence an expert’s attitude. To address this challenge, we propose novel framework involving interval concept that consider a good tool for dealing with the uncertainty, In the proposed approach, the medical images are transformed into interval valued representation approach and entropies are defined for an image object and background. Then we determine a threshold for lower-bound image and for upper-bound image, and then calculate the mean value for the final output results. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we evaluate it by using synthetic image and its ground truth. Experimental results showed how performance of the segmentation-based entropy threshold can be enhanced using proposed approach to overcome ambiguity.

In general, solving the information explosion problem can be delegated to systems for automatic processing of digital data. These systems are intended for recognizing, sorting, meaningfully processing and presenting data in formats readable and interpretable by humans. The creation of intelligent knowledge extraction systems that handle unstructured data would be a natural solution in this area. At the same time, the evident progress in these tasks for structured data contrasts with the limited success of unstructured data processing, and, in particular, document processing. Currently, this research area is undergoing active development and investigation. The present paper is a systematic survey on both Russian and international publications that are dedicated to the leading trend in automatic text data processing: Text Mining (TM). We cover the main tasks and notions of TM, as well as its place in the current AI landscape. Furthermore, we analyze the complications that arise during the processing of texts written in natural language (NLP) which are weakly structured and often provide ambiguous linguistic information. We describe the stages of text data preparation, cleaning, and selecting features which, alongside the data obtained via morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis, constitute the input for the TM process. This process can be represented as mapping a set of text documents to «knowledge». Using the case of stock trading, we demonstrate the formalization of the problem of making a trade decision based on a set of analytical recommendations. Examples of such mappings are methods of Information Retrieval (IR), text summarization, sentiment analysis, document classification and clustering, etc. The common point of all tasks and techniques of TM is the selection of word forms and their derivatives used to recognize content in NL symbol sequences. Considering IR as an example, we examine classic types of search, such as searching for word forms, phrases, patterns and concepts. Additionally, we consider the augmentation of patterns with syntactic and semantic information. Next, we provide a general description of all NLP instruments: morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis. Finally, we end the paper with a comparative analysis of modern TM tools which can be helpful for selecting a suitable TM platform based on the user’s needs and skills.

Data hiding in digital images is a promising direction of cybersecurity. Digital steganography methods provide imperceptible transmission of secret data over an open communication channel. The information embedding efficiency depends on the embedding imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness. These quality criteria are mutually inverse, and the improvement of one indicator usually leads to the deterioration of the others. A balance between them can be achieved using metaheuristic optimization. Metaheuristics are a class of optimization algorithms that find an optimal, or close to an optimal solution for a variety of problems, including those that are difficult to formalize, by simulating various natural processes, for example, the evolution of species or the behavior of animals. In this study, we propose an approach to data hiding in the hybrid spatial-frequency domain of digital images based on metaheuristic optimization. Changing a block of image pixels according to some change matrix is considered as an embedding operation. We select the change matrix adaptively for each block using metaheuristic optimization algorithms. In this study, we compare the performance of three metaheuristics such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and differential evolution to find the best change matrix. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach provides high imperceptibility of embedding, high capacity, and error-free extraction of embedded information. At the same time, storage of change matrices for each block is not required for further data extraction. This improves user experience and reduces the chance of an attacker discovering the steganographic attachment. Metaheuristics provided an increase in imperceptibility indicator, estimated by the PSNR metric, and the capacity of the previous algorithm for embedding information into the coefficients of the discrete cosine transform using the QIM method [Evsutin, Melman, Meshcheryakov, 2021] by 26.02% and 30.18%, respectively, for the genetic algorithm, 26.01% and 19.39% for particle swarm optimization, 27.30% and 28.73% for differential evolution.

Processing of large amounts of data often consists of several steps, e.g. pre- and post-processing stages, which are executed sequentially with data written to disk after each step, however, when pre-processing stage for each task is different the more efficient way of processing data is to construct a pipeline which streams data from one stage to another. In a more general case some processing stages can be factored into several parallel subordinate stages thus forming a distributed pipeline where each stage can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Such processing pattern emerges in a problem of classification of wave energy spectra based on analytic approximations which can extract different wave systems and their parameters (e.g. wave system type, mean wave direction) from spectrum. Distributed pipeline approach achieves good performance compared to conventional “sequential-stage” processing.

The data of episodic field measurements of carbon dioxide balance components (soil respiration — R_soil, ecosystem respiration — R_eco, net ecosystem exchange — NEE) of hayfields under use and abandoned one are interpreted by modelling. The field measurements were carried within five field campaigns in 2018 and 2019 on the drained part of the Dubna Peatland in Taldom District, Moscow Oblast, Russia. The territory is within humid continental climate zone. Peatland drainage was done out for milled peat extraction. After extraction was stopped, the residual peat deposit (1–1.5 m) was ploughed and grassed (Poa pratensis L.) for hay production. The current ground water level (GWL) varies from 0.3–0.5 m below the surface during wet and up to 1.0 m during dry periods. Daily dynamics of CO2 fluxes was measured using dynamic chamber method in 2018 (August) and 2019 (May, June, August) for abandoned ditch spacing only with sanitary mowing once in 5 years and the ditch spacing with annual mowing. NEE and Reco were measured on the sites with original vegetation, and Rsoil — after vegetation removal. To model a seasonal dynamics of NEE, the dependence of its components (Reco, Rsoil, and Gross ecosystematmosphere exchange of carbon dioxide — GEE) from soil and air temperature, GWL, photosynthetically active radiation, underground and aboveground plant biomass were used. The parametrization of the models has been carried out considering the stability of coefficients estimated by the bootstrap method. R2 (α = 0.05) between simulated and measured Reco was 0.44 (p < 0.0003) on abandoned and 0.59 (p < 0.04) on under use hayfield, and GEE was 0.57 (p < 0.0002) and 0.77 (p < 0.00001), respectively. Numerical experiments were carried out to assess the influence of different haymaking regime on NEE. It was found that NEE for the season (May 15 – September 30) did not differ much between the hayfield without mowing (4.5±1.0 tC·ha–1·season–1) and the abandoned one (6.2±1.4). Single mowing during the season leads to increase of NEE up to 6.5±0.9, and double mowing — up to 7.5±1.4 tC·ha–1·season–1. This means increase of carbon losses and CO2 emission into the atmosphere. Carbon loss on hayfield for both single and double mowing scenario was comparable with abandoned hayfield. The value of removed phytomass for single and double mowing was 0.8±0.1 tC·ha^–1·season^–1 and 1.4±0.1 (45% carbon content in dry phytomass) or 3.0 and 4.4 t·ha^–1·season^–1 of hay (17% moisture content). In comparison with the fallow, the removal of biomass of 0.8±0.1 at single and 1.4±0.1 tC·ha^–1·season^–1 double mowing is accompanied by an increase in carbon loss due to CO2 emissions, i.e., the growth of NEE by 0.3±0.1 and 1.3±0.6 tC·ha–1·season–1, respectively. This corresponds to the growth of NEE for each ton of withdrawn phytomass per hectare of 0.4±0.2 tС·ha–1·season–1 at single mowing, and 0.9±0.7 tС·ha^–1·season^–1 at double mowing. Therefore, single mowing is more justified in terms of carbon loss than double mowing. Extensive mowing does not increase CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and allows, in addition, to “replace” part of the carbon loss by agricultural production.