The daily exchange of informatics over the Internet has both eased the widespread proliferation of resources to ease accessibility, availability and interoperability of accompanying devices. In addition, the recent widespread proliferation of smartphones alongside other computing devices has continued to advance features such as miniaturization, portability, data access ease, mobility, and other merits. It has also birthed adversarial attacks targeted at network infrastructures and aimed at exploiting interconnected cum shared resources. These exploits seek to compromise an unsuspecting user device cum unit. Increased susceptibility and success rate of these attacks have been traced to user's personality traits and behaviours, which renders them repeatedly vulnerable to such exploits especially those rippled across spoofed websites as malicious contents. Our study posits a stacked, transfer learning approach that seeks to classify malicious contents as explored by adversaries over a spoofed, phishing websites. Our stacked approach explores 3-base classifiers namely Cultural Genetic Algorithm, Random Forest, and Korhonen Modular Neural Network – whose output is utilized as input for XGBoost meta-learner. A major challenge with learning scheme(s) is the flexibility with the selection of appropriate features for estimation, and the imbalanced nature of the explored dataset for which the target class often lags behind. Our study resolved dataset imbalance challenge using the SMOTE-Tomek mode; while, the selected predictors was resolved using the relief rank feature selection. Results shows that our hybrid yields F1 0.995, Accuracy 0.997, Recall 0.998, Precision 1.000, AUC-ROC 0.997, and Specificity 1.000 – to accurately classify all 2,764 cases of its held-out test dataset. Results affirm that it outperformed bench-mark ensembles. Result shows the proposed model explored UCI Phishing Website dataset, and effectively classified phishing (cues and lures) contents on websites.

The digital revolution frontiers have rippled across society today – with various web content shared online for users as they seek to promote monetization and asset exchange, with clients constantly seeking improved alternatives at lowered costs to meet their value demands. From item upgrades to their replacement, businesses are poised with retention strategies to help curb the challenge of customer attrition. The birth of smartphones has proliferated feats such as mobility, ease of accessibility, and portability – which, in turn, have continued to ease their rise in adoption, exposing user device vulnerability as they are quite susceptible to phishing. With users classified as more susceptible than others due to online presence and personality traits, studies have sought to reveal lures/cues as exploited by adversaries to enhance phishing success and classify web content as genuine and malicious. Our study explores the tree-based Random Forest to effectively identify phishing cues via sentiment analysis on phishing website datasets as scrapped from user accounts on social network sites. The dataset is scrapped via Python Google Scrapper and divided into train/test subsets to effectively classify contents as genuine or malicious with data balancing and feature selection techniques. With Random Forest as the machine learning of choice, the result shows the ensemble yields a prediction accuracy of 97 percent with an F1-score of 98.19% that effectively correctly classified 2089 instances with 85 incorrectly classified instances for the test-dataset.

Customer attrition has become the focus of many businesses today – since the online market space has continued to proffer customers, various choices and alternatives to goods, services, and products for their monies. Businesses must seek to improve value, meet customers' teething demands/needs, enhance their strategies toward customer retention, and better monetize. The study compares the effects of data resampling schemes on predicting customer churn for both Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost ensembles. Data resampling schemes used include: (a) default mode, (b) random-under-sampling RUS, (c) synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), and (d) SMOTE-edited nearest neighbor (SMOTEEN). Both tree-based ensembles were constructed and trained to assess how well they performed with the chi-square feature selection mode. The result shows that RF achieved F1 0.9898, Accuracy 0.9973, Precision 0.9457, and Recall 0.9698 for the default, RUS, SMOTE, and SMOTEEN resampling, respectively. Xgboost outperformed Random Forest with F1 0.9945, Accuracy 0.9984, Precision 0.9616, and Recall 0.9890 for the default, RUS, SMOTE, and SMOTEEN, respectively. Studies support that the use of SMOTEEN resampling outperforms other schemes; while, it attributed XGBoost enhanced performance to hyper-parameter tuning of its decision trees. Retention strategies of recency-frequency-monetization were used and have been found to curb churn and improve monetization policies that will place business managers ahead of the curve of churning by customers.

Blockchain platforms propagate into every facet, including managing medical services with professional and patient-centered applications. With its sensitive nature, record privacy has become imminent with medical services for patient diagnosis and treatments. The nature of medical records has continued to necessitate their availability, reachability, accessibility, security, mobility, and confidentiality. Challenges to these include authorized transfer of patient records on referral, security across platforms, content diversity, platform interoperability, etc. These, are today – demystified with blockchain-based apps, which proffers platform/application services to achieve data features associated with the nature of the records. We use a permissioned-blockchain for healthcare record management. Our choice of permission mode with a hyper-fabric ledger that uses a world-state on a peer-to-peer chain – is that its smart contracts do not require a complex algorithm to yield controlled transparency for users. Its actors include patients, practitioners, and health-related officers as users to create, retrieve, and store patient medical records and aid interoperability. With a population of 500, the system yields a transaction (query and https) response time of 0.56 seconds and 0.42 seconds, respectively. To cater to platform scalability and accessibility, the system yielded 0.78 seconds and 063 seconds, respectively, for 2500 users.

Besides the inherent benefits of exchanging information and interactions between nodes on a social graph, they can also become a means for the propagation of knowledge. Social graphs have also become a veritable structure for the spread of disease outbreaks. These and its set of protocols are deployed as measures to curb its widespread effects as it has also left network experts puzzled. The recent lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic continue to reiterate that diseases will always be around. Nodal exposure, adoption/diffusion of disease(s) among interacting nodes vis-a-vis migration of nodes that cause further spread of contagion (concerning COVID-19 and other epidemics) has continued to leave experts bewildered towards rejigging set protocols. We model COVID-19 as a Markovian process with node targeting, propagation and recovery using migration-interaction as a threshold feat on a social graph. The migration-interaction design seeks to provision the graph with minimization and block of targeted diffusion of the contagion using seedset(s) nodes with a susceptible-infect policy. The study results showed that migration and interaction of nodes via the mobility approach have become an imperative factor that must be added when modeling the propagation of contagion or epidemics.

The advent of the Internet as an effective means for resource sharing has consequently, led to proliferation of adversaries, with unauthorized access to network resources. Adversaries achieved fraudulent activities via carefully crafted attacks of large magnitude targeted at personal gains and rewards. With the cost of over $1.3Trillion lost globally to financial crimes and the rise in such fraudulent activities vis the use of credit-cards, financial institutions and major stakeholders must begin to explore and exploit better and improved means to secure client data and funds. Banks and financial services must harness the creative mode rendered by machine learning schemes to help effectively manage such fraud attacks and threats. We propose HyGAMoNNE – a hybrid modular genetic algorithm trained neural network ensemble to detect fraud activities. The hybrid, equipped with knowledge to altruistically detect fraud on credit card transactions. Results show that the hybrid effectively differentiates, the benign class attacks/threats from genuine credit card transaction(s) with model accuracy of 92%.