Student Profile Modeling Using Boosting Algorithms

The student profile has become an important component of education systems. Many systems objectives, as e-recommendation, e-orientation, e-recruitment and dropout prediction are essentially based on the profile for decision support. Machine learning plays an important role in this context and several studies have been carried out either for classification, prediction or clustering purpose. In this paper, the authors present a comparative study between different boosting algorithms which have been used successfully in many fields and for many purposes. In addition, the authors applied feature selection methods Fisher Score, Information Gain combined with Recursive Feature Elimination to enhance the preprocessing task and models’ performances. Using multi-label dataset predict the class of the student performance in mathematics, this article results show that the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) algorithm achieved the best performance when using Information gain with Recursive Feature Elimination method compared to the other boosting algorithms.

Efficient Seismic Stability Analysis of Embankment Slopes Subjected to Water Level Changes Using Gradient Boosting Algorithms

Embankments are widespread throughout the world and their safety under seismic conditions is a primary concern in the geotechnical engineering community since the failure events may lead to disastrous consequences. This study proposes an efficient seismic slope stability analysis approach by introducing advanced gradient boosting algorithms, namely Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). A database consisting of 600 datasets is prepared for model calibration and evaluation, where the factor of safety (FS) is regarded as the output and four influential factors are selected as the inputs. For each dataset, the FS corresponding to the four inputs is evaluated using the commercial geotechnical software of Slide2. As an illustration, the proposed approach is applied to the seismic stability analysis of a hypothetical embankment example subjected to water level changes. For comparison, the predictive performance of CatBoost, LightGBM, and XGBoost is investigated. Moreover, the Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) method is used in this study to explore the relative importance of the four features. Results show that all the three gradient boosting algorithms (i.e., CatBoost, LightGBM, and XGBoost) perform well in the prediction of FS for both the training dataset and testing dataset. Among the four influencing factors, the friction angle φ is the most important feature variable, followed by horizontal seismic coefficient Kh, cohesion c, and saturated permeability ks.

Boosting algorithms for prediction in agriculture: an application of feature importance and feature selection boosting algorithms for prediction crop damage.

The Agriculture sector has created and collected large amounts of data. It can be gathered, stored, and analyzed to assist in decision making generating competitive value, and the use of Machine Learning techniques has been very effective for this market. In this work, a Machine Learning study was carried out using supervised classification models based on boosting to predict disease in a crop, thus identifying the model with the best areas under curve metrics. Light Gradient Boosting Machine, CatBoost Classifier, Extreme Gradient, Gradient Boosting Classifier, Adaboost models were used to qualify the crop as healthy or sick. One can see that the LightGBM algorithm provided a better fit to the data with an area under the curve of 0.76 under the use of BORUTA variable selection.