Educational Data Mining(EDM)is an emergent discipline that concen-trates on the design of self-learning and adaptive approaches.Higher education institutions have started to utilize analytical tools to improve student...Educational Data Mining(EDM)is an emergent discipline that concen-trates on the design of self-learning and adaptive approaches.Higher education institutions have started to utilize analytical tools to improve students’grades and retention.Prediction of students’performance is a difficult process owing to the massive quantity of educational data.Therefore,Artificial Intelligence(AI)techniques can be used for educational data mining in a big data environ-ment.At the same time,in EDM,the feature selection process becomes necessary in creation of feature subsets.Since the feature selection performance affects the predictive performance of any model,it is important to elaborately investigate the outcome of students’performance model related to the feature selection techni-ques.With this motivation,this paper presents a new Metaheuristic Optimiza-tion-based Feature Subset Selection with an Optimal Deep Learning model(MOFSS-ODL)for predicting students’performance.In addition,the proposed model uses an isolation forest-based outlier detection approach to eliminate the existence of outliers.Besides,the Chaotic Monarch Butterfly Optimization Algo-rithm(CBOA)is used for the selection of highly related features with low com-plexity and high performance.Then,a sailfish optimizer with stacked sparse autoencoder(SFO-SSAE)approach is utilized for the classification of educational data.The MOFSS-ODL model is tested against a benchmark student’s perfor-mance data set from the UCI repository.A wide-ranging simulation analysis por-trayed the improved predictive performance of the MOFSS-ODL technique over recent approaches in terms of different measures.Compared to other methods,experimental results prove that the proposed(MOFSS-ODL)classification model does a great job of predicting students’academic progress,with an accuracy of 96.49%.展开更多
Student performance prediction helps the educational stakeholders to take proactive decisions and make interventions,for the improvement of quality of education and to meet the dynamic needs of society.The selection o...Student performance prediction helps the educational stakeholders to take proactive decisions and make interventions,for the improvement of quality of education and to meet the dynamic needs of society.The selection of features for student’s performance prediction not only plays significant role in increasing prediction accuracy,but also helps in building the strategic plans for the improvement of students’academic performance.There are different feature selection algorithms for predicting the performance of students,however the studies reported in the literature claim that there are different pros and cons of existing feature selection algorithms in selection of optimal features.In this paper,a hybrid feature selection framework(using feature-fusion)is designed to identify the significant features and associated features with target class,to predict the performance of students.The main goal of the proposed hybrid feature selection is not only to improve the prediction accuracy,but also to identify optimal features for building productive strategies for the improvement in students’academic performance.The key difference between proposed hybrid feature selection framework and existing hybrid feature selection framework,is two level feature fusion technique,with the utilization of cosine-based fusion.Whereas,according to the results reported in existing literature,cosine similarity is considered as the best similarity measure among existing similarity measures.The proposed hybrid feature selection is validated on four benchmark datasets with variations in number of features and number of instances.The validated results confirm that the proposed hybrid feature selection framework performs better than the existing hybrid feature selection framework,existing feature selection algorithms in terms of accuracy,f-measure,recall,and precision.Results reported in presented paper show that the proposed approach gives more than 90%accuracy on benchmark dataset that is better than the results of existing approach.展开更多
Elective course selection has always been a serious and important decision making process for students in institutions. The aim of this study is to determine weights of factors affecting elective course selection from...Elective course selection has always been a serious and important decision making process for students in institutions. The aim of this study is to determine weights of factors affecting elective course selection from students' perspective. So as to solve the problem, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based model was used. Factors which affect the elective course selection from students' point of view include five main criteria and 13 sub-criteria which were indicated by students. An online questionnaire containing demographic questions, enabled each student to compare the relative priority of criteria with all of the other criteria. The responses were evaluated via Super Decisions software, and priorities were determined using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). According to the analysis of 40 experts (i.e., graduate students studying in engineering programs), course schedule and teaching staff related factors are the two most important factors affecting the elective course selection. A real- life situation which will help students who are indecisive and hesitates while selecting an elective course was observed. AHP contributes to develop an analytic and comprehensive framework decision making. The method should be considered by faculty member involved in decisions about curriculum update and offering new courses.展开更多
文摘Educational Data Mining(EDM)is an emergent discipline that concen-trates on the design of self-learning and adaptive approaches.Higher education institutions have started to utilize analytical tools to improve students’grades and retention.Prediction of students’performance is a difficult process owing to the massive quantity of educational data.Therefore,Artificial Intelligence(AI)techniques can be used for educational data mining in a big data environ-ment.At the same time,in EDM,the feature selection process becomes necessary in creation of feature subsets.Since the feature selection performance affects the predictive performance of any model,it is important to elaborately investigate the outcome of students’performance model related to the feature selection techni-ques.With this motivation,this paper presents a new Metaheuristic Optimiza-tion-based Feature Subset Selection with an Optimal Deep Learning model(MOFSS-ODL)for predicting students’performance.In addition,the proposed model uses an isolation forest-based outlier detection approach to eliminate the existence of outliers.Besides,the Chaotic Monarch Butterfly Optimization Algo-rithm(CBOA)is used for the selection of highly related features with low com-plexity and high performance.Then,a sailfish optimizer with stacked sparse autoencoder(SFO-SSAE)approach is utilized for the classification of educational data.The MOFSS-ODL model is tested against a benchmark student’s perfor-mance data set from the UCI repository.A wide-ranging simulation analysis por-trayed the improved predictive performance of the MOFSS-ODL technique over recent approaches in terms of different measures.Compared to other methods,experimental results prove that the proposed(MOFSS-ODL)classification model does a great job of predicting students’academic progress,with an accuracy of 96.49%.
文摘Student performance prediction helps the educational stakeholders to take proactive decisions and make interventions,for the improvement of quality of education and to meet the dynamic needs of society.The selection of features for student’s performance prediction not only plays significant role in increasing prediction accuracy,but also helps in building the strategic plans for the improvement of students’academic performance.There are different feature selection algorithms for predicting the performance of students,however the studies reported in the literature claim that there are different pros and cons of existing feature selection algorithms in selection of optimal features.In this paper,a hybrid feature selection framework(using feature-fusion)is designed to identify the significant features and associated features with target class,to predict the performance of students.The main goal of the proposed hybrid feature selection is not only to improve the prediction accuracy,but also to identify optimal features for building productive strategies for the improvement in students’academic performance.The key difference between proposed hybrid feature selection framework and existing hybrid feature selection framework,is two level feature fusion technique,with the utilization of cosine-based fusion.Whereas,according to the results reported in existing literature,cosine similarity is considered as the best similarity measure among existing similarity measures.The proposed hybrid feature selection is validated on four benchmark datasets with variations in number of features and number of instances.The validated results confirm that the proposed hybrid feature selection framework performs better than the existing hybrid feature selection framework,existing feature selection algorithms in terms of accuracy,f-measure,recall,and precision.Results reported in presented paper show that the proposed approach gives more than 90%accuracy on benchmark dataset that is better than the results of existing approach.
文摘Elective course selection has always been a serious and important decision making process for students in institutions. The aim of this study is to determine weights of factors affecting elective course selection from students' perspective. So as to solve the problem, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based model was used. Factors which affect the elective course selection from students' point of view include five main criteria and 13 sub-criteria which were indicated by students. An online questionnaire containing demographic questions, enabled each student to compare the relative priority of criteria with all of the other criteria. The responses were evaluated via Super Decisions software, and priorities were determined using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). According to the analysis of 40 experts (i.e., graduate students studying in engineering programs), course schedule and teaching staff related factors are the two most important factors affecting the elective course selection. A real- life situation which will help students who are indecisive and hesitates while selecting an elective course was observed. AHP contributes to develop an analytic and comprehensive framework decision making. The method should be considered by faculty member involved in decisions about curriculum update and offering new courses.