Cuckoo search (CS) is a recently developed meta-heuristic algorithm, which has shown good performance on many continuous optimization problems. In this paper, we present a new CS algorithm, called NCS, for solving flow shop scheduling problems (FSSP). The NCS hybridizes four strategies: (1) The FSSP is a typical NPhard problem with discrete characteristics. To deal with the discrete variables, ...

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a new swarm intelligence optimization algorithm, which has shown an effective performance on many optimization problems. However, it may suffer from premature convergence when solving complex optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new FA variant, called NSRaFA, which employs a random attractionmodel and three neighborhood search strategies to obtain a trade...

BACKGROUND Stress during pregnancy can have serious adverse outcomes on the mother, the fetus, newborn, children and even adolescents. Socioeconomic status has been recognized as a predictor of stress amongst pregnant women. OBJECTIVES The first aim of this study was to investigate the role of socioeconomic status in pregnancy stress rates. The second aim was to examine the most important ite...

The synthetic association hypothesis proposes that common genetic variants detectable in genome-wide association studies may reflect the net phenotypic effect of multiple rare polymorphisms distributed broadly within the focal gene rather than, as often assumed, the effect of common functional variants in high linkage disequilibrium with the focal marker. In a recent study, Dickson and colleagu...

It is not clear which forms of plasticity in fitness-related traits are associated with invasive species. On one hand, it may be better to have a robust performance across environments. On the other, it may be beneficial to take advantage of limited favorable conditions. We chose to study a worldwide invasive species, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, and compare the plasticity of life-history traits o...

In this paper, land subsidence susceptibility was assessed for Shahryar County in Iran using the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) machine learning algorithm. Another aim of present paper to assess if ensembles ANFIS with two meta-heuristic algorithms (imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and gray wolf optimization (GWO)) would yield a better prediction performance. A remote sens...