Review History


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Summary

  • The initial submission of this article was received on March 31st, 2025 and was peer-reviewed by 3 reviewers and the Academic Editor.
  • The Academic Editor made their initial decision on June 23rd, 2025.
  • The first revision was submitted on July 27th, 2025 and was reviewed by 1 reviewer and the Academic Editor.
  • The article was Accepted by the Academic Editor on September 18th, 2025.

Version 0.2 (accepted)

· · Academic Editor

Accept

Dear authors, we are pleased to verify that you meet the reviewer's valuable feedback to improve your research.

Thank you for considering PeerJ Computer Science and submitting your work.

Kind regards
PCoelho

[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Yilun Shang, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]

Reviewer 2 ·

Basic reporting

-

Experimental design

-

Validity of the findings

-

Version 0.1 (original submission)

· · Academic Editor

Major Revisions

**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.

**Language Note:** The review process has identified that the English language must be improved. PeerJ can provide language editing services - please contact us at [email protected] for pricing (be sure to provide your manuscript number and title). Alternatively, you should make your own arrangements to improve the language quality and provide details in your response letter. – PeerJ Staff

Reviewer 1 ·

Basic reporting

(1) Scenario testing is not clear,

(2) The conclusion lacks sufficient quantitative explanation to support the findings effectively.

Experimental design

-

Validity of the findings

-

Reviewer 2 ·

Basic reporting

This paper compares deep learning models used to detect false data injection in POS. It is an interesting research topic.

Experimental design

Many experiments have been done.

Validity of the findings

The comparison results have some values.

Additional comments

1. What is the main innovation of this paper? Authors should further clarify it.

2. Some other deep learning models, such as graph neural networks, should be reviewed and compared.

3. This paper uses the oversampling method to handle the imbalanced dataset problem. Why did not use another method of handling this problem? How about the experimental results using other methods? Authors should supplement these experiments.

·

Basic reporting

-

Experimental design

-

Validity of the findings

-

Additional comments

This manuscript reports some common False Data Injection Attacks (FDIA) methods targeting Point of Sale (POS) systems. It also discusses the use of deep learning models fine-tuned through specific architectures, such as Random Search Artificial Neural Network (RS-ANN), Bayesian Optimized Convolutional Neural Network Long Short-Term Memory (BO-CNNLSTM), and Hyperband-Autoencoder (HB-AE), along with various oversampling methods, to rapidly and accurately detect FDIA. The following questions should be addressed:

1. The images attached to the article are blurry. The characters in some images are too small to be recognized. Please modify the images.

2. Table 1 appears somewhat cluttered and could be appropriately edited and streamlined. The strengths and weaknesses in the table should be separated into distinct sections to avoid presenting only the advantages or the disadvantages. Table 3 can directly use a confusion matrix figure, which is more intuitive than a table.

3. Section 3.1 appears to overlap with content from Chapter 1 and could be revised accordingly.

4. The equation font style in lines 246 and 255 differs slightly from that in lines 261, 265, and 267. Please ensure consistency in formatting throughout.

5. In line 339, “The architecture of the tuned CNN-BLSTM is shown in Figure 4(b).” Figure 4 is not labeled with (a) and (b).

6. The three pseudo-code segments could be reorganized into subsections 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3. Additionally, formatting inconsistencies exist across these segments; some instances of identical elements are bolded while others are not, and the presentation of conclusions varies between methods. Please ensure consistent formatting throughout. In this section, I suggest emphasizing a clearer explanation of the innovative aspects of the work.

7. In lines 492 and 496, formulas (13) and (14) should end with multiplying by 100% instead of 100.

8. In line 508, it says, “Performance analysis of unbalanced data without tuned layers of deep learning architectures such as ANN, CNN-LSTM, and Autoencoder is shown in Figure 5.”Why not compare ANN with RS-ANN? I think this better suits the research purpose of the paper.

9. The content described in Section 6.5 does not align with the information presented in Table 5. Additionally, Chapter 6 contains ten subsections (6.1 to 6.10), which appear redundant. Consider consolidating or streamlining these sections to improve clarity and conciseness.

10. Each chapter requires a heading, but Chapters 3 and 6 of this paper lack them.

11. The overall structure and level of detail in the entire paper require adjustments.

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