Iraq is highly dependent on international markets to provide food for its residents. As imported food prices are highly dependent on crude oil prices in global markets, any shock in oil prices will have an impact on food consumption in the country. As a result, it is essential to study the demand for imported food at every time period. To the best of our knowledge as researchers, as not even a single study is available in the literature, this paper is considered the first to study the demand for imported food groups in Iraq. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to estimate demand elasticities for several imported food categories in Iraq. This study uses an Almost Ideal Demand System model to analyze the demand for imported f

This paper proposes a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the fine-tuning meta-heuristic algorithm (FTMA) for solving global optimization problems. In this algorithm, the solutions are fine-tuned using the fundamental steps in meta-heuristic optimization, namely, exploration, exploitation, and randomization, in such a way that if one step improves the solution, then it is unnecessary to execute the remaining steps. The performance of the proposed FTMA has been compared with that of five other optimization algorithms over ten benchmark test functions. Nine of them are well-known and already exist in the literature, while the tenth one is proposed by the authors and introduced in this article. One test trial was shown t

In this paper, a new hybridization of supervised principal component analysis (SPCA) and stochastic gradient descent techniques is proposed, and called as SGD-SPCA, for real large datasets that have a small number of samples in high dimensional space. SGD-SPCA is proposed to become an important tool that can be used to diagnose and treat cancer accurately. When we have large datasets that require many parameters, SGD-SPCA is an excellent method, and it can easily update the parameters when a new observation shows up. Two cancer datasets are used, the first is for Leukemia and the second is for small round blue cell tumors. Also, simulation datasets are used to compare principal component analysis (PCA), SPCA, and SGD-SPCA. The results sh

In many video and image processing applications, the frames are partitioned into blocks, which are extracted and processed sequentially. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm for calculation of features of overlapping image blocks. We assume the features are projections of the block on separable 2D basis functions (usually orthogonal polynomials) where we benefit from the symmetry with respect to spatial variables. The main idea is based on a construction of auxiliary matrices that virtually extends the original image and makes it possible to avoid a time-consuming computation in loops. These matrices can be pre-calculated, stored and used repeatedly since they are independent of the image itself. We validated experimentally th

This research aims to analyze and simulate biochemical real test data for uncovering the relationships among the tests, and how each of them impacts others. The data were acquired from Iraqi private biochemical laboratory. However, these data have many dimensions with a high rate of null values, and big patient numbers. Then, several experiments have been applied on these data beginning with unsupervised techniques such as hierarchical clustering, and k-means, but the results were not clear. Then the preprocessing step performed, to make the dataset analyzable by supervised techniques such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Classification And Regression Tree (CART), Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Naïve Bays (NB

In this research the performance of 5G mobile system is evaluated through the Ergodic capacity metric. Today, in an­­y wireless communication system, many parameters have a significant role on system performance. Three main parameters are of concern here; the source power, number of antennas, and transmitter-receiver distance. User equipment’s (UEs) with equal and non-equal powers are used to evaluate the system performance in addition to using different antenna techniques to demonstrate the differences between SISO, MIMO, and massive MIMO. Using two mobile stations (MS) with different distances from the base station (BS), resulted in showing how using massive MIMO system will improve the performance than the standar

Fabrication and investigation of the properties of CdSe/ZnS core/shell for the luminescent solar concentrates (LSC) application is presented. An increase of the efficiency of a silicon solar cell was obtained by applying the LSC. The increase was a result of the optical properties of the semiconductor nanoparticles CdSe/ZnS core/shell that were deposited over the top surface of the silicon solar cell facing the illumination source (Halogen lamp). The gravity force was invested for the film deposition process.The optical properties of these nanoparticles were studied. The absorption spectra for the CdSe/ZnS core-shell were 270-600nm, i.e., located within the spectral response area of the examined solar cell. The energy gap values for CdSe