The Design of Predictive Model for the Academic Performance of Students at University Based on Machine Learning

Students in South African Universities come from different socio-cultural backgrounds, countries and high schools. This suggests that these students have different experiences which impact on their levels of grasping information in class as they potentially use different lenses on tuition. The current practice in Universities in contributing to the academic performance of students includes the use of tutors, the use of mobile devices for first year students, use of student assistants and the use of different feedback measures. What is problematic about the current practice is that students are quitting university in high numbers. In this study, knowledge has been drawn from data through the use of machine learning algorithms. Bayesian networks, support vector machines （SVMs） and decision trees algorithms were used individually in this work to construct predictive models for the academic performance of students. The best model was constructed using SVM and it gave a prediction of 72.87% and a prediction cost of 139. The model does predict the performance of students in advance of the year-end examinations outcome. The results suggest that South African Universities must recognize the diversity in student population and thus provide students with better support and equip them with the necessary knowledge that will enable them to tap into their full potential and thus enhance their skills.

Probability tree based passenger flow prediction and its application to the Beijing subway system

In order to provide citizens with safe, convenient and comfortable services and infrastructure in a metropolis, the prediction of passenger flows in the metro-net of subway system has become more important than ever before. Al- though a great number of prediction methods have been pre- sented in the field of transportation, all of them belong to the station oriented approach, which is not well suited to the Bei- jing subway system. This paper proposes a novel metro-net oriented method, called the probability tree based passenger flow model, which is also based on historic origin-destination （OD） information. First it learns and obtains the appearance probabilities for each kind of OD pair. For the real-time origin datum, the destination datum is calculated, and then several kinds of passenger flow in the metro-net can be pre- dicted by gathering all the contributions. The results of exper- iments, using the historical data of Beijing subway, show that although the proposed method has lower performance than existing prediction approaches for forecasting exit passenger flows, it is able to predict several additional kinds of passen- ger flow in stations and throughout the subway system; and it is a more feasible, suitable, and advanced passenger flow prediction model for Beijing subway system.