Bring Your Own Data to X-PLAIN

Exploring and understanding the motivations behind black-box model predictions is becoming essential in many different applications. X-PLAIN is an interactive tool that allows human-in-the-loop inspection of the reasons behind model predictions. Its support for the local analysis of individual predictions enables users to inspect the local behavior of different classifiers and compare the knowledge different classifiers are exploiting for their prediction. The interactive exploration of prediction explanation provides actionable insights for both trusting and validating model predictions and, in case of unexpected behaviors, for debugging and improving the model itself

Evaluating espresso coffee quality by means of time-series feature engineering

Espresso quality attracts the interest of many stakeholders: from consumers to local business activities, from coffee-machine vendors to international coffee industries. So far, it has been mostly addressed by means of human experts, electronic noses, and chemical approaches. The current work, instead, proposes a datadriven analysis exploiting time-series feature engineering.We analyze a real-world dataset of espresso brewing by professional coffee-making machines. The novelty of the proposed work is provided by the focus on the brewing time series, from which we propose to engineer features able to improve previous data-driven metrics determining the quality of the espresso. Thanks to the exploitation of the proposed features, better quality-evaluation predictions are achieved with respect to previous data-driven approaches that relied solely on metrics describing each brewing as a whole (e.g., average flow, total amount of water). Yet, the engineered features are simple to compute and add a very limited workload to the coffee-machine sensor-data collection device, hence being suitable for large-scale IoT installations on-board of professional coffee machines, such as those typically installed in consumer-oriented business activities, shops, and workplaces. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform a data-driven analysis of real-world espresso-brewing time series. Presented results yield to three-fold improvements in classification accuracy of high-quality espresso coffees with respect to current data-driven approaches (from 30% to 100%), exploiting simple threshold-based quality evaluations, defined in the newly proposed feature space

Leveraging full-text article exploration for citation analysis

Scientific articles often include in-text citations quoting from external sources. When the cited source is an article, the citation context can be analyzed by exploring the article full-text. To quickly access the key information, researchers are often interested in identifying the sections of the cited article that are most pertinent to the text surrounding the citation in the citing article. This paper first performs a data-driven analysis of the correlation between the textual content of the sections of the cited article and the text snippet where the citation is placed. The results of the correlation analysis show that the title and abstract of the cited article are likely to include content highly similar to the citing snippet. However, the subsequent sections of the paper often include cited text snippets as well. Hence, there is a need to understand the extent to which an exploration of the full-text of the cited article would be beneficial to gain insights into the citing snippet, considering also the fact that the full-text access could be restricted. To this end, we then propose a classification approach to automatically predicting whether the cited snippets in the full-text of the paper contain a significant amount of new content beyond abstract and title. The proposed approach could support researchers in leveraging full-text article exploration for citation analysis. The experiments conducted on real scientific articles show promising results: the classifier has a 90% chance to correctly distinguish between the full-text exploration and only title and abstract cases

Predicting student academic performance by means of associative classification

The Learning Analytics community has recently paid particular attention to early predict learners’ performance. An established approach entails training classification models from past learner-related data in order to predict the exam success rate of a student well before the end of the course. Early predictions allow teachers to put in place targeted actions, e.g., supporting at-risk students to avoid exam failures or course dropouts. Although several machine learning and data mining solutions have been proposed to learn accurate predictors from past data, the interpretability and explainability of the best performing models is often limited. Therefore, in most cases, the reasons behind classifiers’ decisions remain unclear. This paper proposes an Explainable Learning Analytics solution to analyze learner-generated data acquired by our technical university, which relies on a blended learning model. It adopts classification techniques to early predict the success rate of about 5000 students who were enrolled in the first year courses of our university. It proposes to apply associative classifiers at different time points and to explore the characteristics of the models that led to assign pass or fail success rates. Thanks to their inherent interpretability, associative models can be manually explored by domain experts with the twofold aim at validating classifier outcomes through local rule-based explanations and identifying at-risk/successful student profiles by interpreting the global rule-based model. The results of an in-depth empirical evaluation demonstrate that associative models (i) perform as good as the best performing classification models, and (ii) give relevant insights into the per-student success rate assignments