scholarly journals A Conceptual Framework to Aid Attribute Selection in Machine Learning Student Performance Prediction Models

Author(s):  
Ijaz Muhammad Khan ◽  
Abdul Rahim Ahmad ◽  
Nafaa Jabeur ◽  
Mohammed Najah Mahdi

One of the important key applications of learning analytics is offering an opportunity to the institutions to track the student’s academic activities and provide them with real-time adaptive consultations if the student academic performance diverts towards the inadequate outcome. Still, numerous barriers exist while developing and implementing such kind of learning analytics applications. Machine learning algorithms emerge as useful tools to endorse learning analytics by building models capable of forecasting the final outcome of students based on their available attributes. The machine learning algorithm’s performance demotes with using the entire attributes and thus a vigilant selection of predicting attributes boosts the performance of the produced model. Though, several constructive techniques facilitate to identify the subset of productive attributes, however, the challenging task is to evaluate if the prediction attributes are meaningful, explicit, and controllable by the students. This paper reviews the existing literature to come up with the student’s attributes used in developing prediction models. We propose a conceptual framework which demonstrates the classification of attributes as either latent or dynamic. The latent attributes may appear significant but the student is not able to control these attribute, on the other hand, the student has command to restrain the dynamic attributes. Each of the major class is further categorized to present an opportunity to the researchers to pick constructive attributes for model development.

Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijuan Yan ◽  
Yanshen Liu

Student performance prediction has become a hot research topic. Most of the existing prediction models are built by a machine learning method. They are interested in prediction accuracy but pay less attention to interpretability. We propose a stacking ensemble model to predict and analyze student performance in academic competition. In this model, student performance is classified into two symmetrical categorical classes. To improve accuracy, three machine learning algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), random forest, and AdaBoost are established in the first level and then integrated by logistic regression via stacking. A feature importance analysis was applied to identify important variables. The experimental data were collected from four academic years in Hankou University. According to comparative studies on five evaluation metrics (precision, recall, F1, error, and area   under   the   receiver   operating   characteristic   curve ( AUC ) in this analysis, the proposed model generally performs better than compared models. The important variables identified from the analysis are interpretable, they can be used as guidance to select potential students.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ijaz Khan ◽  
Abdul Rahim Ahmad ◽  
Nafaa Jabeur ◽  
Mohammed Najah Mahdi

AbstractA major problem an instructor experiences is the systematic monitoring of students’ academic progress in a course. The moment the students, with unsatisfactory academic progress, are identified the instructor can take measures to offer additional support to the struggling students. The fact is that the modern-day educational institutes tend to collect enormous amount of data concerning their students from various sources, however, the institutes are craving novel procedures to utilize the data to magnify their prestige and improve the education quality. This research evaluates the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms to monitor students’ academic progress and informs the instructor about the students at the risk of ending up with unsatisfactory result in a course. In addition, the prediction model is transformed into a clear shape to make it easy for the instructor to prepare the necessary precautionary procedures. We developed a set of prediction models with distinct machine learning algorithms. Decision tree triumph over other models and thus is further transformed into easily explicable format. The final output of the research turns into a set of supportive measures to carefully monitor students’ performance from the very start of the course and a set of preventive measures to offer additional attention to the struggling students.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liyan Pan ◽  
Guangjian Liu ◽  
Xiaojian Mao ◽  
Huixian Li ◽  
Jiexin Zhang ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Central precocious puberty (CPP) in girls seriously affects their physical and mental development in childhood. The method of diagnosis—gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)–stimulation test or GnRH analogue (GnRHa)–stimulation test—is expensive and makes patients uncomfortable due to the need for repeated blood sampling. OBJECTIVE We aimed to combine multiple CPP–related features and construct machine learning models to predict response to the GnRHa-stimulation test. METHODS In this retrospective study, we analyzed clinical and laboratory data of 1757 girls who underwent a GnRHa test in order to develop XGBoost and random forest classifiers for prediction of response to the GnRHa test. The local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) algorithm was used with the black-box classifiers to increase their interpretability. We measured sensitivity, specificity, and area under receiver operating characteristic (AUC) of the models. RESULTS Both the XGBoost and random forest models achieved good performance in distinguishing between positive and negative responses, with the AUC ranging from 0.88 to 0.90, sensitivity ranging from 77.91% to 77.94%, and specificity ranging from 84.32% to 87.66%. Basal serum luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and insulin-like growth factor-I levels were found to be the three most important factors. In the interpretable models of LIME, the abovementioned variables made high contributions to the prediction probability. CONCLUSIONS The prediction models we developed can help diagnose CPP and may be used as a prescreening tool before the GnRHa-stimulation test.


Author(s):  
Cheng-Chien Lai ◽  
Wei-Hsin Huang ◽  
Betty Chia-Chen Chang ◽  
Lee-Ching Hwang

Predictors for success in smoking cessation have been studied, but a prediction model capable of providing a success rate for each patient attempting to quit smoking is still lacking. The aim of this study is to develop prediction models using machine learning algorithms to predict the outcome of smoking cessation. Data was acquired from patients underwent smoking cessation program at one medical center in Northern Taiwan. A total of 4875 enrollments fulfilled our inclusion criteria. Models with artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LoR), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), classification and regression tree (CART), and naïve Bayes (NB) were trained to predict the final smoking status of the patients in a six-month period. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC or ROC value) were used to determine the performance of the models. We adopted the ANN model which reached a slightly better performance, with a sensitivity of 0.704, a specificity of 0.567, an accuracy of 0.640, and an ROC value of 0.660 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.617–0.702) for prediction in smoking cessation outcome. A predictive model for smoking cessation was constructed. The model could aid in providing the predicted success rate for all smokers. It also had the potential to achieve personalized and precision medicine for treatment of smoking cessation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (Suppl 3) ◽  
pp. A62-A62
Author(s):  
Dattatreya Mellacheruvu ◽  
Rachel Pyke ◽  
Charles Abbott ◽  
Nick Phillips ◽  
Sejal Desai ◽  
...  

BackgroundAccurately identified neoantigens can be effective therapeutic agents in both adjuvant and neoadjuvant settings. A key challenge for neoantigen discovery has been the availability of accurate prediction models for MHC peptide presentation. We have shown previously that our proprietary model based on (i) large-scale, in-house mono-allelic data, (ii) custom features that model antigen processing, and (iii) advanced machine learning algorithms has strong performance. We have extended upon our work by systematically integrating large quantities of high-quality, publicly available data, implementing new modelling algorithms, and rigorously testing our models. These extensions lead to substantial improvements in performance and generalizability. Our algorithm, named Systematic HLA Epitope Ranking Pan Algorithm (SHERPA™), is integrated into the ImmunoID NeXT Platform®, our immuno-genomics and transcriptomics platform specifically designed to enable the development of immunotherapies.MethodsIn-house immunopeptidomic data was generated using stably transfected HLA-null K562 cells lines that express a single HLA allele of interest, followed by immunoprecipitation using W6/32 antibody and LC-MS/MS. Public immunopeptidomics data was downloaded from repositories such as MassIVE and processed uniformly using in-house pipelines to generate peptide lists filtered at 1% false discovery rate. Other metrics (features) were either extracted from source data or generated internally by re-processing samples utilizing the ImmunoID NeXT Platform.ResultsWe have generated large-scale and high-quality immunopeptidomics data by using approximately 60 mono-allelic cell lines that unambiguously assign peptides to their presenting alleles to create our primary models. Briefly, our primary ‘binding’ algorithm models MHC-peptide binding using peptide and binding pockets while our primary ‘presentation’ model uses additional features to model antigen processing and presentation. Both primary models have significantly higher precision across all recall values in multiple test data sets, including mono-allelic cell lines and multi-allelic tissue samples. To further improve the performance of our model, we expanded the diversity of our training set using high-quality, publicly available mono-allelic immunopeptidomics data. Furthermore, multi-allelic data was integrated by resolving peptide-to-allele mappings using our primary models. We then trained a new model using the expanded training data and a new composite machine learning architecture. The resulting secondary model further improves performance and generalizability across several tissue samples.ConclusionsImproving technologies for neoantigen discovery is critical for many therapeutic applications, including personalized neoantigen vaccines, and neoantigen-based biomarkers for immunotherapies. Our new and improved algorithm (SHERPA) has significantly higher performance compared to a state-of-the-art public algorithm and furthers this objective.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fang He ◽  
John H Page ◽  
Kerry R Weinberg ◽  
Anirban Mishra

BACKGROUND The current COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented; under resource-constrained setting, predictive algorithms can help to stratify disease severity, alerting physicians of high-risk patients, however there are few risk scores derived from a substantially large EHR dataset, using simplified predictors as input. OBJECTIVE To develop and validate simplified machine learning algorithms which predicts COVID-19 adverse outcomes, to evaluate the AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve), sensitivity, specificity and calibration of the algorithms, to derive clinically meaningful thresholds. METHODS We conducted machine learning model development and validation via cohort study using multi-center, patient-level, longitudinal electronic health records (EHR) from Optum® COVID-19 database which provides anonymized, longitudinal EHR from across US. The models were developed based on clinical characteristics to predict 28-day in-hospital mortality, ICU admission, respiratory failure, mechanical ventilator usages at inpatient setting. Data from patients who were admitted prior to Sep 7, 2020, is randomly sampled into development, test and validation datasets; data collected from Sep 7, 2020 through Nov 15, 2020 was reserved as prospective validation dataset. RESULTS Of 3.7M patients in the analysis, a total of 585,867 patients were diagnosed or tested positive for SARS-CoV-2; and 50,703 adult patients were hospitalized with COVID-19 between Feb 1 and Nov 15, 2020. Among the study cohort (N=50,703), there were 6,204 deaths, 9,564 ICU admissions, 6,478 mechanically ventilated or EMCO patients and 25,169 patients developed ARDS or respiratory failure within 28 days since hospital admission. The algorithms demonstrated high accuracy (AUC = 0.89 (0.89 - 0.89) on validation dataset (N=10,752)), consistent prediction through the second wave of pandemic from September to November (AUC = 0.85 (0.85 - 0.86) on post-development validation (N= 14,863)), great clinical relevance and utility. Besides, a comprehensive 386 input covariates from baseline and at admission was included in the analysis; the end-to-end pipeline automates feature selection and model development process, producing 10 key predictors as input such as age, blood urea nitrogen, oxygen saturation, which are both commonly measured and concordant with recognized risk factors for COVID-19. CONCLUSIONS The systematic approach and rigorous validations demonstrate consistent model performance to predict even beyond the time period of data collection, with satisfactory discriminatory power and great clinical utility. Overall, the study offers an accurate, validated and reliable prediction model based on only ten clinical features as a prognostic tool to stratifying COVID-19 patients into intermediate, high and very high-risk groups. This simple predictive tool could be shared with a wider healthcare community, to enable service as an early warning system to alert physicians of possible high-risk patients, or as a resource triaging tool to optimize healthcare resources. CLINICALTRIAL N/A


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthijs Blankers ◽  
Louk F. M. van der Post ◽  
Jack J. M. Dekker

Abstract Background Accurate prediction models for whether patients on the verge of a psychiatric criseis need hospitalization are lacking and machine learning methods may help improve the accuracy of psychiatric hospitalization prediction models. In this paper we evaluate the accuracy of ten machine learning algorithms, including the generalized linear model (GLM/logistic regression) to predict psychiatric hospitalization in the first 12 months after a psychiatric crisis care contact. We also evaluate an ensemble model to optimize the accuracy and we explore individual predictors of hospitalization. Methods Data from 2084 patients included in the longitudinal Amsterdam Study of Acute Psychiatry with at least one reported psychiatric crisis care contact were included. Target variable for the prediction models was whether the patient was hospitalized in the 12 months following inclusion. The predictive power of 39 variables related to patients’ socio-demographics, clinical characteristics and previous mental health care contacts was evaluated. The accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the machine learning algorithms were compared and we also estimated the relative importance of each predictor variable. The best and least performing algorithms were compared with GLM/logistic regression using net reclassification improvement analysis and the five best performing algorithms were combined in an ensemble model using stacking. Results All models performed above chance level. We found Gradient Boosting to be the best performing algorithm (AUC = 0.774) and K-Nearest Neighbors to be the least performing (AUC = 0.702). The performance of GLM/logistic regression (AUC = 0.76) was slightly above average among the tested algorithms. In a Net Reclassification Improvement analysis Gradient Boosting outperformed GLM/logistic regression by 2.9% and K-Nearest Neighbors by 11.3%. GLM/logistic regression outperformed K-Nearest Neighbors by 8.7%. Nine of the top-10 most important predictor variables were related to previous mental health care use. Conclusions Gradient Boosting led to the highest predictive accuracy and AUC while GLM/logistic regression performed average among the tested algorithms. Although statistically significant, the magnitude of the differences between the machine learning algorithms was in most cases modest. The results show that a predictive accuracy similar to the best performing model can be achieved when combining multiple algorithms in an ensemble model.


Student Performance Management is one of the key pillars of the higher education institutions since it directly impacts the student’s career prospects and college rankings. This paper follows the path of learning analytics and educational data mining by applying machine learning techniques in student data for identifying students who are at the more likely to fail in the university examinations and thus providing needed interventions for improved student performance. The Paper uses data mining approach with 10 fold cross validation to classify students based on predictors which are demographic and social characteristics of the students. This paper compares five popular machine learning algorithms Rep Tree, Jrip, Random Forest, Random Tree, Naive Bayes algorithms based on overall classifier accuracy as well as other class specific indicators i.e. precision, recall, f-measure. Results proved that Rep tree algorithm outperformed other machine learning algorithms in classifying students who are at more likely to fail in the examinations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 4499-4504

Heart diseases are responsible for the greatest number of deaths all over the world. These diseases are usually not detected in early stages as the cost of medical diagnostics is not affordable by a majority of the people. Research has shown that machine learning methods have a great capability to extract valuable information from the medical data. This information is used to build the prediction models which provide cost effective technological aid for a medical practitioner to detect the heart disease in early stages. However, the presence of some irrelevant and redundant features in medical data deteriorates the competence of the prediction system. This research was aimed to improve the accuracy of the existing methods by removing such features. In this study, brute force-based algorithm of feature selection was used to determine relevant significant features. After experimenting rigorously with 7528 possible combinations of features and 5 machine learning algorithms, 8 important features were identified. A prediction model was developed using these significant features. Accuracy of this model is experimentally calculated to be 86.4%which is higher than the results of existing studies. The prediction model proposed in this study shall help in predicting heart disease efficiently.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
El houssaine Bouras ◽  
Lionel Jarlan ◽  
Salah Er-Raki ◽  
Riad Balaghi ◽  
Abdelhakim Amazirh ◽  
...  

<p>Cereals are the main crop in Morocco. Its production exhibits a high inter-annual due to uncertain rainfall and recurrent drought periods. Considering the importance of this resource to the country's economy, it is thus important for decision makers to have reliable forecasts of the annual cereal production in order to pre-empt importation needs. In this study, we assessed the joint use of satellite-based drought indices, weather (precipitation and temperature) and climate data (pseudo-oscillation indices including NAO and the leading modes of sea surface temperature -SST- in the mid-latitude and in the tropical area) to predict cereal yields at the level of the agricultural province using machine learning algorithms (Support Vector Machine -SVM-, Random forest -FR- and eXtreme Gradient Boost -XGBoost-) in addition to Multiple Linear Regression (MLR). Also, we evaluate the models for different lead times along the growing season from January (about 5 months before harvest) to March (2 months before harvest). The results show the combination of data from the different sources outperformed the use of a single dataset; the highest accuracy being obtained when the three data sources were all considered in the model development. In addition, the results show that the models can accurately predict yields in January (5 months before harvesting) with an R² = 0.90 and RMSE about 3.4 Qt.ha<sup>-1</sup>.  When comparing the model’s performance, XGBoost represents the best one for predicting yields. Also, considering specific models for each province separately improves the statistical metrics by approximately 10-50% depending on the province with regards to one global model applied to all the provinces. The results of this study pointed out that machine learning is a promising tool for cereal yield forecasting. Also, the proposed methodology can be extended to different crops and different regions for crop yield forecasting.</p>


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