Curricular Analytics in Higher Education

The dissertation addresses different aspects of student success in higher education. Numerous factors may impact a student\u27s ability to succeed and ultimately graduate, including pre-university preparation, as well as the student support services provided by a university. However, even the best efforts to improve in these areas may fail if other institutional factors overwhelm their ability to facilitate student progress. This dissertation addresses this issue from the perspective of curriculum structure. The structural properties of individual curricula are studied, and the extent to which this structure impacts student progress is explored. The structure of curricula are studied using actual university data and analyzed by applying different data mining techniques, machine learning methods and graph theory. These techniques and methods provide a mathematical tool to quantify the complexity of a curriculum structure. The results presented in this work show that there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of a curriculum and the graduation rate of students attempting that curriculum. To make it more practical, this study was extended further to implement a number of predictive models that give colleges and universities the ability to track the progress of their students in order to improve retention and graduation rates. These models accurately predict the performance of students in subsequent terms and accordingly could be used to provide early intervention alerts. The dissertation addresses another important aspect related to curricula. Specifically, how course enrollment sequences in a curriculum impact student progress. Thus, graduation rates could be improved by directing students to follow better course sequences. The novelty of the models presented in this dissertation is characterized in introducing graduation rate, for the first time in literature, from the perspective of curricular complexity. This provides the faculty and staff the ability to better advise students earlier in their academic careers

Goal Programming for Academic Plans Design

This article describes a project undertaken at the Islamic University in Gaza. The project aims at designing a general academic departmental plan of study using binary goal programming. The design process includes balancing the assignment of courses to semesters. Soft and hard constraints are first identified based on interviews with academic experts. Then, a model that uses multiple criteria programming is built and used to construct the plan of study of the industrial engineering department at the Islamic University in Gaza. To determine the weights of the criteria, the researcher attempted to use Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). However, after interviewing the experts, it was concluded that pre-emptive goal programming is recommended. The model was then solved using LP-Solve software. The resulting plan of study clearly outperforms the manually designed one. A comparison between the newly designed

Solving Course Selection Problem by a Combination of Correlation Analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process

In the universities where students have a chance to select and enroll in a particular course, they require special support to avoid the wrong combination of courses that might lead to delay their study. Analysis shows that the students' selection is mainly influenced by list of factors which we categorized them into three groups of concern: course factors, social factors, and individual factors. This paper proposed a two-phased model where the most correlated courses are generated and prioritized based on the student preferences. At this end, we have applied the multi-criteria analytic hierarchy process (MC-AHP) in order to generate the optimum set of courses from the available courses pool. To validate the model, we applied it to the data from students of the Information System Department at Taibah University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Automated medical scheduling : fairness and quality

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les façons de tenir compte de la qualité et de l’équité dans les algorithmes de confection automatique d’horaires de travail. Nous découpons ce problème en deux parties. La modélisation d’un problème d’horaires permet de créer des horaires plus rapidement qu’un humain peut le faire manuellement, puisqu’un ordinateur peut évaluer plusieurs horaires simultanément et donc prendre des décisions en moins de temps. La première partie du problème étudié consiste à améliorer la qualité des horaires en encodant des contraintes et des préférences à l’aide de modèles mathématiques. De plus, puisque la création est plus rapide à l’aide d’un ordinateur, il est plus facile pour un ordinateur de trouver l’horaire ayant la meilleure qualité lorsque les règles et préférences sont clairement définies. Toutefois, déterminer les règles et préférences d’un groupe de personne n’est pas une tâche facile. Ces individus ont souvent de la difficulté à exprimer formellement leurs besoins et leurs préférences. Par conséquent, la création d’un bon modèle mathématique peut prendre beaucoup de temps, et cela même pour un expert en création d’horaires de travail. C’est pourquoi la deuxième partie de cette thèse concerne la réduction du temps de modélisation à l’aide d’algorithmes capable d’apprendre un modèle mathématique à partir de solutions données comme par exemple, dans notre cas, des horaires de travail.In this thesis, we study the ways to take quality and fairness into account in the algorithms of automatic creation of work schedules. We separate this problem into two subproblems. The modeling of a scheduling problem allows a faster creation of schedules than what a human can produce manually. A computer can generate and evaluate multiple schedules at a time and therefore make decisions in less time. This first part of the studied problem consists in improving the quality of medical schedules by encoding constraints and preferences using mathematical models. Moreover, since the creation is faster, it is easier for a computer to find the schedule with the highest quality when the rules and the preferences are clearly defined. However, determining the rules and preferences of a group of people is not an easy task. Those individuals often have difficulties formally expressing their requirements and preferences. Therefore, the creation a good mathematical model might take a long time, even for a scheduling expert. This is why the second part of this thesis concerns the reduction of modeling time using algorithms able to learn mathematical models from given solutions, in our case schedules

Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered