In today’s global economy, accurately predicting foreign exchange rates or estimating their trends correctly is crucial for informed investment decisions. Despite the success of standalone models like ARIMA and deep learning models like LSTM, challenges persist in capturing both linear and nonlinear dynamics in highly volatile exchange rate environments. Motivated by the limitations of these individual models and the need for more robust forecasting tools, this study proposes a hybrid ARIMA-LSTM model that integrates ARIMA’s strength in modeling linear trends with LSTM’s capability to capture nonlinear dependencies, using historical USD/NGN exchange rate data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) spanning 2001 to 2024. The research hypothesis posits that the hybrid ARIMA-LSTM model will significantly outperform standalone models in forecasting accuracy. By comparing these models against state-of-the-art approaches, the study highlights the advantages of hybridizing statistical and deep learning methods. The findings demonstrate that the hybrid model achieved the lowest Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 2.216 and the highest R² of 0.998, indicating superior forecasting performance. This study fills a critical research gap by demonstrating the effectiveness of hybrid deep learning in financial time series forecasting, providing valuable insights for investors, policymakers, and financial analysts. Future research will extend this work by incorporating the latest dataset and evaluating model robustness during the recent surge in the Naira/Dollar exchange rate from 2023 to 2024.

Human action recognition involves recognizing and classifying actions performed by humans. It has many applications, including sports, healthcare, and surveillance. Challenges such as a limited number of classes of activities and variations within inter and intra-class groups lead to high misclassification rates in some of the intelligent systems developed. Existing studies focused mainly on using public datasets with little focus on real-life action datasets, with limited research on HAR for military obstacle-crossing activities.  This paper focuses on recognizing human actions in an obstacle-crossing competition video sequence where multiple participants are performing different obstacle-crossing activities. This study proposes a feature descriptor approach that combines a Histogram of Oriented Gradient and Region Descriptors (HOGReG) for human action recognition in a military obstacle crossing competition. The dataset was captured during military trainees’ obstacle-crossing exercises at a military training institution to achieve this objective. Images were segmented into background and foreground using a Grabcut-based segmentation algorithm, and thereafter, features were extracted and used for classification. The features were extracted using a Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and region descriptors from segmented images. The extracted features are presented to a neural network classifier for classification and evaluation. The experimental results recorded 63.8%, 82.6%, and 86.4% recognition accuracies using the region descriptors HOG and HOGReG, respectively. The region descriptor gave a training time of 5.6048 seconds, while HOG and HOGReG reported 32.233 and 31.975 seconds, respectively. The outcome shows how effectively the suggested model performed.