A new framework in improving prediction of class imbalance for student performance in Oman educational dataset using clustering based sampling techniques

According to the Oman Education Portal (OEP), data set imbalances are common in student performance. Most of the students are performing welI, while only small cases of students are underperformed. Classification techniques for the imbalanced dataset can yield deceivingly high prediction accuracy. The majority class usually drives the overall predictive accuracy at the expense of having abysmal performance on the minority class. The main objective of this study was to predict students' performance which consisted of imbalanced class distribution, by exploiting different sampling techniques and several data mining classifier models. Three main sampling techniques - synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE), random under-sampling (RUS), and clustering-based sampling were compared to improve the predictive accuracy in the minority class while maintaining satisfactory overall classification performance. Five different data-mining classifiers - J48, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbour, Naïve Bayes, and Logistic Regression were used to predict the student performance. 10-fold cross-validation was utilized to minimize the sampling bias. The classifiers' performance was evaluated using four metrics: accuracy, False Positive (FP), Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). The OEP datasets between 2018 and 2019 were extracted to assess the efficacy of both sampling techniques and classification methods. The results indicated that the K-Nearest Neighbors combined with the clustering-based sampling technique produced the best classification performance with an MCC value of 98.4% on the 10-fold crossvalidation. The clustering-based sampling techniques improved the overall prediction performance for the minority class. In addition, the most important variables to accurately predict student performance were identified by utilizing the Random Forest model. OEP contains a large amount of data and analyses based on this large and complex data can be useful for OEP stakeholders in improving student performance and identifying students who require additional attention

Applications

Volume 3 describes how resource-aware machine learning methods and techniques are used to successfully solve real-world problems. The book provides numerous specific application examples: in health and medicine for risk modelling, diagnosis, and treatment selection for diseases in electronics, steel production and milling for quality control during manufacturing processes in traffic, logistics for smart cities and for mobile communications

Applications

Volume 3 describes how resource-aware machine learning methods and techniques are used to successfully solve real-world problems. The book provides numerous specific application examples: in health and medicine for risk modelling, diagnosis, and treatment selection for diseases in electronics, steel production and milling for quality control during manufacturing processes in traffic, logistics for smart cities and for mobile communications

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

PROCEEDINGS 5th PLATE Conference

The 5th international PLATE conference (Product Lifetimes and the Environment) addressed product lifetimes in the context of sustainability. The PLATE conference, which has been running since 2015, has successfully been able to establish a solid network of researchers around its core theme. The topic has come to the forefront of current (political, scientific & societal) debates due to its interconnectedness with a number of recent prominent movements, such as the circular economy, eco-design and collaborative consumption. For the 2023 edition of the conference, we encouraged researchers to propose how to extend, widen or critically re-construct thematic sessions for the PLATE conference, and the paper call was constructed based on these proposals. In this 5th PLATE conference, we had 171 paper presentations and 238 participants from 14 different countries. Beside of paper sessions we organized workshops and REPAIR exhibitions