Key course selection for academic early warning based on Gaussian processes

Min Yin, Jing Zhao, Shiliang Sun

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Academic early warning (AEW) is very popular in many colleges and universities, which is to warn students who have very poor grades. The warning strategies are often made according to some simple statistical methods. The existing AEW system can only warn students, and it does not make any other analysis for academic data, such as the importance of courses. It is significant to discover useful information implicit in data by some machine learning methods, since the hidden information is probably ignored by the simple statistical methods. In this paper, we use the Gaussian process regression (GPR) model to select key courses which should be paid more attention to. Specifically, an automatic relevance determination (ARD) kernel is employed in the GPR model. The length-scales in the ARD kernel as hyperparameters can be learned through the model selection procedure. The importance of different courses can be measured by these corresponding length-scales. We conduct experiments on real-world data. The experimental results show that our approaches can make reasonable analysis for academic data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIntelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning - 17th International Conference, IDEAL 2016, Proceedings
EditorsDaoqiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Hujun Yin, Bin Li, Yun Li, Ming Yang, Frank Klawonn, Antonio J. Tallón-Ballesteros
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages240-247
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9783319462561
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event17th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2016 - Yangzhou, China
Duration: 12 Oct 201614 Oct 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9937 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityYangzhou
Period12/10/1614/10/16

Keywords

  • Academic early warning
  • Automatic relevance determination kernel
  • Gaussian process regression
  • Key course selection

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