Reviewer #3: The paper and the subject are both interesting.

The authors make an interesting combination of FFA and SVM and moreover they compare with the results obtained by ANN and global SVM. Main Points to be addressed: 1. Page 4, "in advance. In" Please leave a space before dot. This problem is met some more times through the paper. Please correct it. 2. I think that the proper way to make references inside the text is by using square brackets [2] and not parenthesis.. Please correct it. 3. The authors say "Fire fly algorithm" Please either use lower case or upper case for this phrase through the text. Do not mix them. 4. Page 4. the authors say "soft computational techniques" The correct term is "soft computating techniques" Also Expert systems are not soft computing method, they belong to Computational Intelligence. So if you refer to soft computing you should know that it includes ANN, SVM and Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy systems. So please adjust your sentence here accordingly. 5. Page 6. The authors say "classification, regression analysis, or to recognize pattern." Pattern Recognition and Classification are similar processes, so please do not refer to them as distinct ones. 6. For all cases ANN and SVM I need to know the percent (and the absolute number) of data records used for training, validation and testing. Also I need to know for the ANN the transfer function, the learning algorithm and the number of iterations that produced the best ANN. 7. In page 14 the authors say "A trail and error" Correct to "trial and error" 8. The use of R in the results tables is not informative. The readers would like to see the values of R2 (coefficient of determination). So please use R2 everywhere because R2 is the only way to see the degree of good behavior of the mode, whereas R is not giving much. 9. Where the actual data vectors normalized before the development of the models? 10. 10. I need to see a detailed discussion of the actual improvement by the use of FFA-SVM versus single use of SVM Reviewer #2: In this paper a novel method based on coupling the Fire Fly Algorithm (FFA) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) is proposed to forecast the malaria incidences. Fire Fly Algorithm (FFA) was employed in determining the parameters of SVM. The results appear to be good. The methodology novelty of this paper is relatively low. But the application is interesting. The references for SVM are quite obsolete. In fact, recently, there are many developments in this field, which should be reflected in this paper. Some closely related references for this purpose are given below. 1 J. Shawe-Taylor, et al.: A review of optimization methodologies in support vector machines. Neurocomputing 74(17): 3609-3618, 2011. 2 Y. Ji, S. Sun: Multitask multiclass support vector machines: Model and experiments. Pattern Recognition 46(3): 914-924, 2013. 3 X. Xie, et al.: Multitask Twin Support Vector Machines. ICONIP 2012: 341-348 The English writing and paper format should be seriously improved. I just cannot point out all of the inappropriate places. Some are given below. "Where" above equation (1) should be in lower case. The "C" just below equation (1) should be italicized as given in equation (1). The "Kernel" in paragraph 3 of page 6 should not be capitalized. There should be no indent below (4). Some reference information such as the publication date and pages is missing.