Three-Way Decisions on Streaming Computing Platforms Supporting Decision-Making in Complex Large Real-World Environments

Fuccio, Graziano; Loia, Vincenzo; Orciuoli, Francesco

doi:10.1109/access.2022.3223472

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Among the other original aspects, the proposed approach includes the application of a customised version of the Sequential Three-Way Decisions method that is used to reduce complexity and improve the prediction performance along the timeline in order to support data streaming. A different technical approach supporting data streaming based on a Three-Way Decisions implementation on Apache Spark 3 has been proposed in [25]. Lastly, the authors will focus on analyzing dropout patterns within specific subject areas in the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Time-Aware Approach for MOOC Dropout Prediction Based on Rule Induction and Sequential Three-Way Decisions

Blundo,

Loia,

Orciuoli

2023

IEEE Access

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Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are adopted by students worldwide. One of the main critical issues often associated to MOOCs is the dropout phenomenon. In other words, the percentage of students abandoning a MOOC-based study path is considered still too high. Therefore, an increasing number of scientific works, coming from several and heterogeneous communities (e.g., computer science, data science, statistics, education) proposes approaches trying to mitigate such a problem. The majority of the aforementioned works focuses on machine learning methods to define classifiers able to be trained and, subsequently, to predict students who are going to abandon a course before it ends. Among such approaches, the ones achieving the best performance use enriched sets of features (to train their models) and produce results that cannot be used to easily clearly characterize the different behaviours of dropping-out and non-dropping-out students. The present work proposes the design of a novel process to train a set of dropout predictors leveraging on a reduced set of features. The underlying idea is to exploit weekly data in order to classify, with acceptable levels of precision, students who are likely going towards dropout or not. In cases of uncertainty, the classification decision is deferred to the next week, when new data is available. Such an approach offers several advantages. The first one is the chance to build a real-time educational decision support systems able to support decision as sufficient information is available. The second one is to preserve resources and avoiding wasting them with students erroneously classified at risk of dropout. The third one is to allow explicit characterization of dropout-conducing behaviour by using a rule mining approach.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%