This paper describes an approach for improving the accuracy of memory-based collaborative filtering, based on the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method. Recommender systems are used to filter the huge amount of data available online based on user-defined preferences. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a commonly used recommendation approach that generates recommendations based on correlations among user preferences. Although several enhancements have increased the accuracy of memory-based CF through the development of improved similarity measures for finding successful neighbors, there has been less investigation into prediction score methods, in which rating/preference scores are assigned to items that have not yet been selected by a user. A TOPSIS solution for evaluating multiple alternatives based on more than one criterion is proposed as an alternative to prediction score methods for evaluating and ranking items based on the results from similar users. The recommendation accuracy of the proposed TOPSIS technique is evaluated by applying it to various common CF baseline methods, which are then used to analyze the MovieLens 100K and 1M benchmark datasets. The results show that CF based on the TOPSIS method is more accurate than baseline CF methods across a number of common evaluation metrics.
The exponential growth in computer technology throughout the past two decades has facilitated the development of advanced image analysis techniques which aid the field of medical imaging. CT is a widely used medical screening method used to obtain high resolution images of the human body. CT has been proven useful in the screening of the virus that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic by allowing physicians to rule out suspected infections based on the appearance of the lungs from the CT scan. Based on this, we hereby propose an intelligent yet efficient CT scan-based COVID-19 classification algorithm that is able to discriminate negative from positive cases by evaluating the appearance of lungs. The algorithm is comprised of four main steps: preprocessing, features extraction, features reduction, and classification. In preprocessing, we employ the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) to adjust the contrast of the image to enhance the details of the input image. We then apply the q-transform method to extract features from the CT scan. This method measures the grey level intensity of the pixels which reflects the features of the image. In the feature reduction step, we measure the mean, skewness and standard deviation to reduce overhead and improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Finally, "k-nearest neighbor", "decision tree", and "support vector machine" are used as classifiers to classify the cases. The experimental results show accuracy rates of 98%, 98%, and 98.25% for each of the classifiers, respectively. It is therefore concluded that the proposed method is efficient, accurate, and flexible. Overall, we are confident that the proposed algorithm is capable of achieving a high classification accuracy under different scenarios, which makes it suitable for implementation in real-world applications.