Intelligent Recommendation System for Higher Education

Education domain is very vast and the data is increasing every day. Extracting information from this data requires various data mining techniques. Educational data mining combines various methods of data mining, machine learning and statistics; which are appropriate for the unique data that comes from educational sector. Most of the education recommendation systems available help students to choose particular stream for graduate education after successful schooling or to choose particular career options after graduation. Counseling students during their course of graduate education will help him to comprehend subjects in better ways that will results in enhancing his understanding about subjects. This is possible by knowing the ability of student in learning subjects in past semesters and also mining the similar learning patterns from the past databases. Most educational systems allow students to plan out their subjects (particularly electives) during the beginning of the semester or course. The student is not fully aware about what subjects are good for his career, in which field he is interested in, or how would he perform. Recommending students to choose electives by considering his learning ability, his area of interest, extra-curricular activities and his performance in prerequisites would facilitate students to give a better performance and avoid their risk of failure. This would allow student to specialize in his domain of interest. This early prediction benefits the students to take necessary steps in advance to avoid poor performance and to improve their academic scores. To develop this system, various algorithms and recommendation techniques have to be applied. This paper reviews various data mining and machine learning approaches which are used in educational field and how it can be implemented

A survey of big data and machine learning

This paper presents a detailed analysis of big data and machine learning (ML) in the electrical power and energy sector. Big data analytics for smart energy operations, applications, impact, measurement and control, and challenges are presented in this paper. Big data and machine learning approaches need to be applied after analyzing the power system problem carefully. Determining the match between the strengths of big data and machine learning for solving the power system problem is of utmost important. They can be of great help to plan and operate the traditional grid/smart grid (SG). The basics of big data and machine learning are described in detailed manner along with their applications in various fields such as electrical power and energy, health care and life sciences, government, telecommunications, web and digital media, retailers, finance, e-commerce and customer service, etc. Finally, the challenges and opportunities of big data and machine learning are presented in this paper

A TIERED RECOMMENDER SYSTEM FOR COST-EFFECTIVE CLOUD INSTANCE SELECTION

Cloud computing has greatly impacted the scientific community and the end users. By leveraging cloud computing, small research institutions and undergraduate colleges are able to alleviate costs and achieve research goals without purchasing and maintaining all the hardware and software. In addition, cloud computing allows researchers to access resources as their teams require and allows real-time collaboration with team members across the globe. Nowadays however, users are easily overwhelmed by the wide range of cloud servers and instances. Due to differences between the cloud server platforms and between instances within the platform, users find it difficult to identify the right instance match for their application. Therefore, we propose the A2Cloud-Hierarchy (A2Cloud-H) framework that recommends Cloud instances to users for high-performance scientific computing. The framework comprises four components: training data collection, supervised learning (SL) module, unsupervised learning (USL) module, and a decision module. The training database comprise testing traces of previous application and Cloud instances; these are contributed by the scientific community. The SL module contains three popular supervised learning modules: logistic regression, support vector machine and random forest, which train using the database to qualitatively assess the instance performance for the target application. The USL module includes three collaborative filtering methods: application-based, instance-based and rank-based, which use the database to estimate the instances’ performance ratings for the target application. The decision module comprises multiple tiers of analytic hierarchy processing, which consolidate the instance recommendation from the SL and USL modules into a final instance recommendation. The model is trained and validated by 8 real-world applications on 20 Cloud instances, yielding more than 90% modeling accuracy. The recommendation and integration method proposed in this thesis can help promote a better cloud computing environment for both end-users and cloud server platforms

Improving Items and Contexts Understanding with Descriptive Graph for Conversational Recommendation

State-of-the-art methods on conversational recommender systems (CRS) leverage external knowledge to enhance both items' and contextual words' representations to achieve high quality recommendations and responses generation. However, the representations of the items and words are usually modeled in two separated semantic spaces, which leads to misalignment issue between them. Consequently, this will cause the CRS to only achieve a sub-optimal ranking performance, especially when there is a lack of sufficient information from the user's input. To address limitations of previous works, we propose a new CRS framework KLEVER, which jointly models items and their associated contextual words in the same semantic space. Particularly, we construct an item descriptive graph from the rich items' textual features, such as item description and categories. Based on the constructed descriptive graph, KLEVER jointly learns the embeddings of the words and items, towards enhancing both recommender and dialog generation modules. Extensive experiments on benchmarking CRS dataset demonstrate that KLEVER achieves superior performance, especially when the information from the users' responses is lacking.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 9 table