Vector mosquito image classification using novel RIFS feature selection and machine learning models for disease epidemiology

Every year about one million people die due to diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. The infection is transmitted to a person when an infected mosquito stings, injecting the saliva into the human body. The best possible way to prevent a mosquito-borne infection till date is to save the humans from exposure to mosquito bites. This study proposes a Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning based system to detect the presence of two critical disease spreading classes of mosquitoes such as the Aedes and Culex. The proposed system will effectively aid in epidemiology to design evidence-based policies and decisions by analyzing the risks and transmission. The study proposes an effective methodology for the classification of mosquitoes using ML and CNN models. The novel RIFS has been introduced which integrates two types of feature selection techniques – the ROI-based image filtering and the wrappers-based FFS technique. Comparative analysis of various ML and deep learning models has been performed to determine the most appropriate model applicable based on their performance metrics as well as computational needs. Results prove that ETC outperformed among the all applied ML model by providing 0.992 accuracy while VVG16 has outperformed other CNN models by giving 0.986 of accuracy.