M. E. Alqaysi

Recommender systems (RSs) have become critical elements in modern instances of information and decision-support systems, resulting in a transformation of user experiences through highly personalized suggestions for an undeniably vast range of items. Although RSs have become commonplace, they continue to evolve, and their challenges, including sparsity, cold-start, scalability, and vulnerability to adversarial challenges remain. The use of clustering methods has proven highly effective in resolving these issues through the discovery and exploitation of latent user behaviour patterns, segmenting user groups that contribute more towards personalized and adaptable RSs. Additionally, adversarial learning has become a growing focus of study as a proposed solution for shielding and defending RSs, processes, and data from manipulation and attacks, resulting in greater resistance and trustworthiness. This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) that explores the intersection of RSs, clustering methods, and adversarial learning. This paper synthesizes a critique of the latest hybrid recommendations, detailing motivations, challenges, directions for future study, and practical recommendations drawn from the examined studies. An SLR search of four academic databases, ScienceDirect (SD), IEEE Xplore (IEEE), Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS), delivered an initial yield of 843 studies; after filtration, 51 studies remained. All the retained articles were examined and characterized in terms of dataset details, techniques, frameworks, and performance. A significant gap in research has emerged regarding the overreliance on datasets from commercial and entertainment domains, with a notable scarcity of studies addressing critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and other critical fields where diverse data sources should invoke robust, secure, and trustworthy RSs recommendations. Future research is needed to develop adversarially robust RSs for high-stakes applications requiring stringent accuracy and safety standards. This review provides a rich critical examination of the literature to embolden the ideas and theories associated with clustering methods and adversarial learning working together within RSs. It offers concrete opportunities and directions for carrying out future work in developing next-generation secure, adaptive recommendation frameworks. These findings corroborate a change in perspective on designing systems that seek to develop an RSs that can withstand adversarial threats and promote the development of safer, fairer, and more reliable decision-support systems in a variety of domains.

Evaluating the trustworthiness of deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems is challenging. There is a need to optimize trust and performance in model selection. A wide range of models based on evaluation metrics can make it challenging to choose the best one, especially for complex multi-criteria decision-making problems. In the case of COVID-19 diagnosis, using both physicians’ evaluation and AI techniques to establish trust is essential. In this study, 1551 chest X-rays were analyzed using deep transfer learning (DTL) with six models and four SVM kernels. This resulted in 24 hybrid DTL–SVM models. Seven metrics were evaluated using fuzzy multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM), which uses a dynamic decision matrix to select the best model. This matrix incorporates fuzzy-weighted zero-inconsistency (FWZIC) for weight coefficients and Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) for benchmarking. The Grad-CAM technique compared the best model with 16 images, ensuring explainability. Top-performing models were identified, including SqueezeNet-SVM linear, VGG19-SVM linear, and VGG19-SVM. Sensitivity analysis was used to quantify the impact of changing weighted criteria values. A physician expert validated fuzzy MCDM through Grad-CAM analysis, a new aspect of this study. The framework presented in this study was benchmarked against seven other studies and achieved a perfect score in four crucial areas. Trustworthiness is essential for CAD systems, and this study effectively addresses trust and performance challenges in AI model-based CAD systems. The study systematically evaluated the requirements for trustworthiness, including accountability, fairness, robustness, accuracy, and reproducibility, and the results supported this.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurobehavioral condition that begins in childhood and continues throughout life, affecting communication and verbal and behavioral skills. It is challenging to discover autism in the early stages of life, which prompted researchers to intensify efforts to reach the best solutions to treat this challenge by introducing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and machine learning (ML) algorithms, which played an essential role in greatly assisting the medical and healthcare staff and trying to obtain the highest predictive results for autism spectrum disorder. This study is aimed at systematically reviewing the literature related to the criteria, including multimedical tests and sociodemographic characteristics in AI techniques and ML contributions. Accordingly, this study checked the Web of Science (WoS), Science Direct (SD), IEEE Xplore digital library, and Scopus databases. A set of 944 articles from 2017 to 2021 is collected to reveal a clear picture and better understand all the academic literature through a definitive collection of 40 articles based on our inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selected articles were divided based on similarity, objective, and aim evidence across studies. They are divided into two main categories: the first category is “diagnosis of ASD based on questionnaires and sociodemographic features” ( n = 39 ). This category contains a subsection that consists of three categories: (a) early diagnosis of ASD towards analysis, (b) diagnosis of ASD towards prediction, and (c) diagnosis of ASD based on resampling techniques. The second category consists of “diagnosis ASD based on medical and family characteristic features” ( n = 1 ). This multidisciplinary systematic review revealed the taxonomy, motivations, recommendations, and challenges of diagnosis ASD research in utilizing AI techniques and ML algorithms that need synergistic attention. Thus, this systematic review performs a comprehensive science mapping analysis and identifies the open issues that help accomplish the recommended solution of diagnosis ASD research. Finally, this study critically reviews the literature and attempts to address the diagnosis ASD research gaps in knowledge and highlights the available ASD datasets, AI techniques and ML algorithms, and the feature selection methods that have been collected from the final set of articles.