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In recommender systems, matrix factorization and its variants have grown up to be dominant in collaborative filtering due to their simplicity and effectiveness. In matrix factorization based methods, dot product which is actually used as a measure of distance from users to items, does not satisfy the inequality property, and thus may fail to capture the inner grained preference information and further limits the performance of recommendations. Metric learning produces distance functions that capture the essential relationships among rating data and has been successfully explored in collaborative recommendations. However, without the global statistical information of user-user pairs and item-item pairs, it makes the model easy to achieve a suboptimal metric. For this, we present a co-occurrence embedding regularized metric learning model (CRML) for collaborative recommendations. We consider the optimization problem as a multi-task learning problem which includes optimizing a primary task of metric learning and two auxiliary tasks of representation learning. In particular, we develop an effective approach for learning the embedding representations of both users and items, and then exploit the strategy of soft parameter sharing to optimize the model parameters. Empirical experiments on four datasets demonstrate that the CRML model can enhance the naive metric learning model and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy of collaborative recommendations., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Real recommender systems usually contain various auxiliary information. Some of the most recent works make meaningful exploration of incorporating auxiliary information into the representation model for competitive recommendation. However, learning user and item representations still faces two challenges: (1) existing works do not well address the problem of integrating multi-type auxiliary information; (2) learning representations for inactive users is still challenging due to the high sparsity of explicit user-item associations. In order to tackle these problems, in this paper, the attributed heterogeneous network and bipartite interaction network are employed to incorporate various auxiliary information and user-item associations. A joint objective function and an efficient algorithm are devised for the representation learning. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has significant advantages over the state-of-the-art baselines. What is remarkable is that our proposed method is demonstrated to be especially useful for dealing with low-active users in the system., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

These days, due to the increasing amount of information generated on the web, most web service providers try to personalize their services. Users also interact with web-based systems in multiple ways and state their interests and preferences by rating the provided items. In this paper, we propose a framework to predict users' demographic based on ratings registered by users in a system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the item ratings are employed for users' demographic prediction problem, which has extensively been studied in recommendation systems and service personalization. We apply the framework to Movielens dataset's ratings and predict users' age and gender. The experimental results show that using all ratings registered by users improves the prediction accuracy by at least 16% compared with previously studied models. Moreover, by classifying the items as popular and unpopular, we eliminate ratings belong to 95% of items and still reach an acceptable level of accuracy. This significantly reduces update cost in a time-varying environment. Besides this classification, we propose other methods to reduce data volume while keeping the predictions accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge graphs are extensively utilized in diverse fields such as search engines, recommendation systems, and dialogue systems, and knowledge graph reasoning plays an important role in the aforementioned domains. Graph neural networks demonstrate the capability to effectively capture and process the graph structure inherent in knowledge graphs, leveraging the relationships between nodes and edges to enable efficient reasoning. Current research on graph neural networks relies on predefined propagation paths. The models based on predefined propagation paths overlook the correlation between entities and query relations, limiting adaptability and scalability. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph neural network with an incremental learning mechanism to search the adaptive propagation path in order to retain promising targets. In detail, the incremental learning mechanism is able to filter out unrelated entities in the propagation path by incorporating the node sampling technique to increase the learning efficiency of the model. In addition, the incremental learning mechanism can select semantically related entities, which promotes the capture of meaningful connections among different nodes in the knowledge graph. At the same time, we apply the parameter initialization module to accelerate the convergence and improve the robustness of the model. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the adaptive graph neural network with the incremental learning mechanism has excellent semantic awareness ability, which surpasses several excellent knowledge graph reasoning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of Recommender Systems (RS) has surged due to the widespread growth of the Internet and its related technologies. The efficiency of the RS is dependent on the quality of the underlying datasets used for training. Sparse datasets present a challenge for training such systems and negatively impacts their efficiency. This research paper presents novel synergistic approaches that combine Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), and Extreme Learning Machines (ELM), to enhance Collaborative Filtering (CF) in RS. The study introduces two clustering-based approaches, FCM-ELM and FCM-RBM-ELM, to address the issue of non-optimal hidden biases and input weights in ELM caused by random assignment in order to overcome the data sparsity effect in RS. The efficiency of proposed approaches against different clustering methods has been evaluated using two benchmark datasets and four metrics. The empirical results indicate that the proposed methods can generate better recommendation results compared to other traditional techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender Systems (RSs) have recently emerged as a practical solution to the information overload problem users face when searching for digital content. In general, RSs provide their respective users with specialized advice and guidance in order to make informed decisions on the selection of suitable digital content. This paper is a systematic literature review of recent (2011–2023) publications on RSs designed and developed in the context of education to support teachers in particular—one of the target groups least frequently addressed by existing RSs. A body of 61 journal papers is selected and analyzed to answer research questions focusing on experimental studies that include RS evaluation and report evaluation results. This review is expected to help teachers in better exploiting RS technology as well as new researchers/developers in this field in better designing and developing RSs for the benefit of teachers. An interesting result obtained through this study is that the recent employment of machine learning algorithms for the generation of recommendations has brought about significant RS quality and performance improvements in terms of recommendation accuracy, personalization and timeliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems are vulnerable to attacks because of their open nature. Counterfeit users give biased ratings to the items due to various objectives that may lead to the loss of user trust. The attackers use certain attack models with specific features. The existing attack detection techniques are typically attack-specific and work only when the attack features are known. They are unable to identify an unknown attack with unfamiliar features. To diminish this problem, in this paper, we propose a generalized solution that filters any attack irrespective of its design and features. We trained the classifiers with the ratings of the known authentic users using one-class SVM and PU learning models for detecting attacks, considering their ability to detect anomalies in the dataset caused by unknown attacks. The openly available MovieLens dataset has been used to assess our designed attack detection method. The experimental results show that all unknown attacks are successfully detected with 100% accuracy. The same detection accuracy is achieved for attacks with known features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presents a Cluster-Based Cab Recommender System (CBCRS) designed to optimize cab services by suggesting the nearest locations with a higher likelihood of finding passengers. To achieve this, the system employs advanced clustering techniques to cluster historical cab pickup locations, identifying areas with higher passenger possibilities at specific times and days. The research aims to develop an algorithmic framework for CBCRS based on a hybrid clustering technique. The objectives of the study are twofold: first, to identify current clustering techniques used in clustering cab pickup geo-points, and second, to propose a framework for CBCRS based on the most efficient clustering technique. This framework will accept the current location of the cab driver and recommend the next nearest passenger pickup location. Additionally, the study compares and contrasts the proposed system with other clustering techniques using three standard datasets, evaluating them based on intrinsic measures such as the Calinski-Harabasz Index and Silhouette-Score. The paper concludes by evaluating and contrasting the proposed CBCRS framework with different clustering techniques, analyzing the results using statistical parameters. The findings reveal that the proposed CBCRS system generates better recommendations for the cab drivers using CBCRS hybrid clustering technique as compared to K-Means, BIRCH, DBSCAN clustering algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collecting data from users is a frequent practice for websites to improve various aspects of their products and services, such as performance, usability, and security. Monitoring user activity on websites helps to comprehend visitor behavior and assess the impact of the site. Numerous applications involve the collection of user data by websites, enabling the prediction of user preferences. This, in turn, facilitates personalized content recommendations. Recommender systems serve as a mechanism to propose analogous items and concepts tailored to an individual's unique mindset. Fundamentally, there are two categories of recommender systems: Collaborative Filtering and Content-Based Filtering. This paper provides a comparative study of collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a collaborative filtering algorithm based on reinforcement learning theory. Then, the personalized bank financial recommendation system for users is constructed in the massive data environment. Tags mimic different types of user interest points to build a representative personalized data set. The collaborative screening of bank financial products is realized using the simulation results and users' historical access records. The ranking calculation of related financial products is added to the general bank financial product recommendation system. This method can more accurately express the query results for a specific user. It is found that the collaborative filtering algorithm based on enhanced learning theory can improve the efficiency of collaborative screening of bank financial products. The best results can be obtained by combining the two organically. This paper proposes that the recommendation algorithm of reinforcement learning bank financial products based on user preference and collaborative filtering is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gradient boosting machines harnesses the inherent capabilities of decision trees and meticulously corrects their errors in a sequential fashion, culminating in remarkably precise predictions. Word2Vec, a prominent word embedding technique, occupies a pivotal role in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Its proficiency lies in capturing intricate semantic relationships among words, thereby facilitating applications such as sentiment analysis, document classification, and machine translation to discern subtle nuances present in textual data. Bayesian networks introduce probabilistic modeling capabilities, predominantly in contexts marked by uncertainty. Their versatile applications encompass risk assessment, fault diagnosis, and recommendation systems. Gated recurrent units (GRU), a variant of recurrent neural networks, emerges as a formidable asset in modeling sequential data. Both training and testing are crucial to the success of an intrusion detection system (IDS). During the training phase, several models are created, each of which can recognize typical from anomalous patterns within a given dataset. To acquire passwords and credit card details, "phishing" usually entails impersonating a trusted company. Predictions of student performance on academic tasks are improved by hyper parameter optimization of the gradient boosting regression tree using the grid search approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture in Maharashtra has immense importance in India, acting as the back-bone of the economy and a primary livelihood source for a significant population. Being the third largest state in India, Maharashtra has a high scale crop production in the country which also has an important impact on the economy. Initially the study focus on developing predictive models that guide farmers in selecting suitable crops for the divisions in the state of Maharashtra. This study presents a Crop Recommendation System (CRS) designed to support Maharashtra's agricultural sector by utilizing a comprehensive dataset from 2001 to 2022 provided by the India Meteorological Department. This study helps in improvising technical efficiency and productivity of the farmers. Harvesting crops in optimal condition can help to produce efficient harvest hence the research concentrates on providing best crop recommendation system (CRS) with the help of Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. The data, enhanced for accuracy using expectation-maximization optimization, underpins predictive models that guide crop selection. EM contributes to a more robust and reliable dataset for subsequent analyses and modeling by iterative estimating and updating missing values based on probabilistic expectations. Key findings show that the Random Forest algorithm excels in predicting suitable crops with 92% accuracy. Further precision is achieved through a Long Short-Term Memory network forecasting weather patterns three months ahead, accommodating temporal data variations. Subsequently, the proposed system leverages these forecasts to recommend five ideal crops per division within Maharashtra, aiding farmers' decision-making and adapting to regional climatic conditions. A supplementary crop calendar offers monthly district-specific planting guidance. An intuitive Graphical User Interface delivers this information effectively, ensuring practical and informed agricultural choices across the state. In essence, the study provides an innovative tool for enhancing economic stability and sustenance in Maharashtra through technology-driven agriculture recommendations aligned with future weather expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Food is one of the most underrated entities with respect to diseases. Food or Diet plays a vital role in healing or recovery of a patient which brings forth the need of analyzing disease and diets associations. The study of such associations is crucial for recommending appropriate diets to patients but is an arduous task due to the complex interdependencies as is evident in literature. Thus, it becomes necessary to automate the analysis and make it available as a service. The main aim of this work is to efficiently collate and analyze disease‐diet associations and provide it as an accessible and adaptable service using a combination of advanced techniques. Complex disease‐diet interdependencies are curated from the literature and transformed into a network offering various parameters for further analysis. The analysis is done using machine learning algorithms to predict accurate and robust recommendations. Cloud computing aids this analysis by providing sufficient resources and making it more accessible. Thus, the recommendations are constructed using amalgamation of techniques including network analysis, machine learning, and cloud computing. The deduced associations from the analysis of medical data using these technologies would aid doctors and healthcare institutions in decision making thereby improving the prognosis of a disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential recommendation systems in cold-start scenarios aim to provide recommendations as accurately as possible for users with sparse behavior, which is a challenging issue in this field. Recently, meta-learning algorithms have been introduced into the cold-start recommendations and have obtained some better results. However, most of these meta-learning-based methods require auxiliary information or knowledge from other fields, and do not model the third-order relationship between users and their sequential interactive items, which could result in models lacking the ability to capture dynamic transitions of user preferences. In addition, the traditional meta-learning-based methods ignore the diversity of user preferences, which limits the performance improvement in sequential recommendation systems in the cold-start scenarios. To address the above problems, a new sequential recommendation model is proposed for cold-start scenarios which combines meta-learning and attention mechanism. In the proposed model, a third-order interaction modeling paradigm of "Item-User-Item" (IUI) is proposed firstly to obtain dynamic transitions of user preferences in the item space. Then, an embedding strategy is used to embed the user behavior sequences and transition information of user preferences from the training task into a spatial self-attentive (SS) recommendation model. Moreover, a meta-learning-based parameter training approach is presented, where a task processor (TP) is designed to improve the universality of parameter initialization. At last, some experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets, and the evaluation metrics HR@10 and NDCG@10 of the proposed model improve by about 5.1% and 5.6% compared with the baseline, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed model in this paper achieves the best recommendation results in comparison with existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research in the mobile app recommendation system (MARS) is steadily increasing due to the involvement of big data and social information. Few existing systems explore the possibility of social interaction information and generate accurate recommendations. However, the role of social network-based app recommendations and associated privacy issues are not fully explored because social information from the mobile phone is difficult to access. To refine and construct such a system, it is imperative to understand users' opinions on the type of social interaction information to be included and concerning privacy issues. To achieve this, we conducted a questionnaire survey. We collected data from 1,006 participants, and tested our hypothesis using PLS, Blindfolding, Bootstrapping, and Machine Learning approaches. After evaluation, we consolidate a final feature list related to social interaction and privacy aspects. For practical evaluation, we implemented a prototype using a few social features identified in the questionnaire phase. Our results indicate an increase in click rate up to 0.66. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the complex dynamics of modern information systems such as e-commerce and streaming services, managing uncertainty and leveraging information theory are crucial in enhancing session-aware recommender systems (SARSs). This paper presents an innovative approach to SARSs that combines static long-term and dynamic short-term preferences within a counterfactual causal framework. Our method addresses the shortcomings of current prediction models that tend to capture spurious correlations, leading to biased recommendations. By incorporating a counterfactual viewpoint, we aim to elucidate the causal influences of static long-term preferences on next-item selections and enhance the overall robustness of predictive models. We introduce a dual-tower architecture with a novel data augmentation process and a self-supervised training strategy, tailored to tackle inherent biases and unreliable correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming existing benchmarks and paving the way for more accurate and reliable session-based recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food Recommender Systems (RecSys) are innovative knowledge systems that inform consumers of food choices according to criteria, including nutritional content, health concerns, production method, carbon footprint or other social and ethical considerations. They raise important questions at the intersection of technology accuracy and today evolving consumers' knowledge seeking behaviours, which implies to unpack the epistemic value of food RecSys. This study investigates the drivers of the perceived value of food RSs consumption by proposing a model that establishes via PLS-SEM (n = 253) a positive relationship between the Yuka company's food RecSys' epistemic value and its perceived value. The model demonstrates that Yuka RecSys' epistemic value relies on the disciplinary drivers of compatibility, self-confidence, and consumer innovativeness, and the problematising drivers of memory and learning, which come from using the application. The perceived value of food RecSys is found to relate to RecSys epistemic value beyond the functional accuracy aspects of recommendation algorithms. Results highlight the importance of developing a refined understanding of epistemic value considering the consumption of RecSys. RecSys' developers, retailers, food manufacturers and policy makers must work on better mapping and adjusting information through consumers socialised RecSys' usage to shape the design of the next generation RecSys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread adoption of Electronic Healthcare Records has resulted in an abundance of healthcare data. This data holds significant potential for improving healthcare services by providing valuable clinical insights and enhancing clinical decision-making. This paper presents a patient classification methodology that utilizes a multiclass and multilabel diagnostic approach to predict the patient's clinical class. The proposed model effectively handles comorbidities while maintaining a high level of accuracy. The implementation leverages the MIMIC III database as a data source to create a phenotyping dataset and train the models. Various machine learning models are employed in this study. Notably, the natural language processing-based One-Vs-Rest classifier achieves the best classification results, maintaining accuracy and F1 scores even with a large number of classes. The patient diagnostic class prediction model, based on the International Classification of Diseases 9, showcased in this paper, has broad applications in diagnostic support, treatment prediction, clinical assistance, recommender systems, clinical decision support systems, and clinical knowledge discovery engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and machine learning (ML) has the potential to significantly enhance the productivity and profitability of traditional fish farming. Farmers using traditional fish farming methods incur enormous economic costs owing to labor-intensive schedule monitoring and care, illnesses, and sudden fish deaths. Another ongoing issue is automated fish species recommendation based on water quality. On the one hand, the effective monitoring of abrupt changes in water quality may minimize the daily operating costs and boost fish productivity, while an accurate automatic fish recommender may aid the farmer in selecting profitable fish species for farming. In this paper, we present AquaBot, an IoT-based system that can automatically collect, monitor, and evaluate the water quality and recommend appropriate fish to farm depending on the values of various water quality indicators. A mobile robot has been designed to collect parameter values such as the pH, temperature, and turbidity from all around the pond. To facilitate monitoring, we have developed web and mobile interfaces. For the analysis and recommendation of suitable fish based on water quality, we have trained and tested several ML algorithms, such as the proposed custom ensemble model, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), bagging, boosting, and stacking, on a real-time pond water dataset. The dataset has been preprocessed with feature scaling and dataset balancing. We have evaluated the algorithms based on several performance metrics. In our experiment, our proposed ensemble model has delivered the best result, with 94% accuracy, 94% precision, 94% recall, a 94% F1-score, 93% MCC, and the best AUC score for multi-class classification. Finally, we have deployed the best-performing model in a web interface to provide cultivators with recommendations for suitable fish farming. Our proposed system is projected to not only boost production and save money but also reduce the time and intensity of the producer's manual labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can algorithms that predict customer movie and shopping preferences also predict which employees are likely to leave andwhere they are likely to go, thus helping to retain talent? This study applies a type of machine learning (ML) technique, collaborative filtering (CF) recommender system algorithms, to investigate the comparison between satisfaction with the current job and potential satisfaction with job alternatives, which is inherent in theorizing about individual turnover decisions. The comparison of those anticipated ratings along with employee's current job satisfaction creates two operationalizations: the quantity of more desirable job alternatives and the quality (or extent of desirability) of job alternatives. To test the effectiveness of this novel approach, we applied recommender system algorithms to a longitudinal archival dataset of employees and had three main findings. First, the recommender system algorithms efficiently predicted job satisfaction based on just two sources of information (i.e., work history and job satisfaction in previous jobs), providing construct validity evidence for recommender systems. Second, both the quantity and the quality of more desirable job alternatives compared to the current job positively correlated with employees' future turnover behavior. Finally, our CF recommender system algorithms predicted where employees moved to, and even more effectively if constraining the alternative jobs to the same occupation. We conclude with implications how recommender system algorithms can help scholars effectively test theoretical ideas and practitioners predict and reduce turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite much research being conducted within the scope of sustainable tourism, more progress has yet to be made in defining how close or far different countries are from achieving this goal. Consequently, this paper aims to evaluate and compare the commitment of citizens, as tourists, from the 27 member states of the European Union to sustainable tourism. A map of sustainability was developed through the use of machine learning algorithms. A cluster analysis was performed, followed by a sustainable rating. The main findings indicate the existence of three country segments among the European Union member states according to the involvement of its citizens as tourists with sustainable practices: highly committed, moderately committed, and uncommitted. Based on these segments, we proposed a recommendation system that suggests the top-five countries where tourists could exchange sustainable tourism habits based on the idea of contagion or imitation behaviours among individuals across an extensive set of everyday decisions. The results reveal significant variations in sustainable tourism practices across member states, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for harmonisation. By implementing this recommendation system, we facilitate the adoption of sustainable habits among tourists and stakeholders, driving a more unified approach to sustainability in the multiple tourism destinations. This study shows no convergence between the 27 European Union member states regarding sustainable tourism. Therefore, political policies are necessary so that all citizens converge on sustainable tourist habits and the European Union contributes, as a whole, to sustainable tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing crop yield with sustainable growth is the primary requirement for farmers with a growing population. Effective management and conservation of depleting natural resources is a priority task. Decrease in manpower due to migrating population has forced automation in agriculture. In this work, an automatic water irrigation and an effective crop recommendation system is proposed. Gypsum blocks based soil sensor is used to measure dielectric permittivity associated with the tested soil. The water-potential present in soil, along with potassium (K), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potential of hydrogen (pH) helps to quantify the soil nutrients available and the suitable crop that can be considered for harvesting in a specified demography and environment. Sensory data indicating soil quality obtained is used to recommend crops by utilizing machine learning approaches. Telegram application is linked to the recommendation model to assist decision making and to ensure farmer-friendliness by sending notifications periodically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous discovery and update of applications or their boundaries running in cloud environments in an automatic way is a highly required function of modern data center operation solutions. Prior attempts to address this problem within various products or projects were/are applying rule-driven approaches or machine learning techniques on specific types of data–network traffic as well as property/configuration data of infrastructure objects, which all have their drawbacks in effectively identifying roles of those resources. The current proposal (ADLog) leverages log data of sources, which contain incomparably richer contextual information, and demonstrates a reliable way of discriminating application objects. Specifically, using native constructs of VMware Aria Operations for Logs in terms of event types and their distributions, we group those entities, which then can be potentially enriched with indicative tags automatically and recommended for further management tasks and policies. Our methods differentiate not only diverse kinds of applications, but also their specific deployments, thus providing hierarchical representation of the applications in time and topology. For several applications under Aria Ops management in our experimental test bed, we discover those in terms of similarity behavior of their components with a high accuracy. The validation of the proposal paves the path for an AI-driven solution in cloud management scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home automation, supported by smart devices and the internet of things, works to enhance household control. However, the reliance on current systems with fixed rules poses challenges, which can be inflexible and anxiety-provoking for users who want control over their smart home devices, limit responsiveness to changing conditions and affect energy efficiency, comfort and security. To address this, the paper proposes a dynamic personalized recommender system that considers the user's current state and contextual preferences to suggest relevant automation services for smart home devices. The system uses an unsupervised algorithm to extract rules from past interactions and supervised algorithms to make recommendations based on those rules. The proposed context-aware recommender system for smart homes achieved a remarkable average accuracy of 86.99%, a recall of 76.06% and a precision of 82.67% on publicly available datasets, surpassing previous studies. It offers users an enhanced quality of life, energy efficiency and cost reduction, while providing service providers with increased engagement and valuable insights.

The recommendation is an active area of scientific research; it is also a challenging and fundamental problem in online education. However, classical recommender systems usually suffer from item cold-start issues. Besides, unlike other fields like e-commerce or entertainment, e-learning recommendations must ensure that learners have the adequate background knowledge to cognitively receive the recommended learning objects. For that reason, when designing an efficient e-learning recommendation method, these challenges should be considered. To address those issues, in this paper, we first propose extracting pairs concept prerequisites using Linked Open Data (LOD). Then, we evaluate the proposed list of prerequisite relationships using machine learning predictive models. Then, we present the recommendation approach based on matching concept's prerequisites relation and courses metadata through a similarity score. The experimental result of prerequisite identification was evaluated using four well-known machine learning algorithms while achieving an accuracy of 90%. Moreover, using three known evaluation metrics, the final prerequisite-based recommendation demonstrates very good results (NDCG@10 = 86%). This solution will enhance recommendations on online learning platforms. Additionally, it will overcome the cold-start issue and accomplish the needed prerequisites and background knowledge for learners to attain their learning objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of mobile devices has significantly increased in recent years, becoming an integral part of our daily lives. This shift has created promising opportunities for mobile advertising, with industry leaders like Apple and Google already integrating it into their services. However, effective mobile advertising still grapples with challenges such as precise customer targeting and adaptability in an ever-changing landscape. To address these issues, we propose an innovative mobile advertising recommender system that employs "context-fitness" and "social referral" techniques. Experiments provide compelling evidence that context-aware information significantly enhances accuracy in predicting users' evolving needs. With our system, we can identify the most suitable ads for targeted users in a changing environment and enhance ad effectiveness by considering friends’ influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learners are confronted with an ever-growing array of diverse and complex educational resources as music education increasingly moves to online platforms. Traditional resource curation methods, which rely heavily on educators, fall short of meeting the dynamic needs of modern students. To address this issue, we present a novel recommendation system for music e-learning resources that combines the power of blockchain technology with a hybrid deep learning model. Our model combines blockchain's robust security and transparency features with advanced deep learning algorithms, enhancing the personalization and efficiency of resource recommendations. A backpropagation neural network with K nearest neighbor classification, traditional collaborative filtering (CF), and an improved CF algorithm are used in the hybrid approach. For the back propagation neural network algorithm, K nearest neighbor classification algorithm, traditional collaborative filtering (CF) and improved CF algorithm, the accuracy rate of improved CF algorithm is higher, reaching 95%. Comparing the proposed model with the association rule-based recommendation model and the content-based recommendation model, the model constructed in this study received high evaluation from experts, with an average score of 98, and more than 97% of them gave a high score of 95 or more, and the evaluation of experts tended to be consistent. Overall, the model proposed in this study can make better recommendations for music education learning resources and bring users a good learning experience, so this study has some practical application value. This research demonstrates a highly effective, blockchain-enhanced recommendation system for music e-learning resources. Our model has significant practical value and potential for adoption in online music education platforms because it provides tailored educational content and an enhanced learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Internet applications adopt real-time bidding mechanisms to ensure different services (types of content) are shown to the users through fair competitions. The service offering the highest bid price gets the content slot to present a list of items in its candidate pool. Through user interactions with the recommended items, the service obtains the desired engagement activities. We propose a contextual-bandit framework to jointly optimize the price to bid for the slot and the order to rank its candidates for a given service in this type of recommendation systems. Our method can take as input any feature that describes the user and the candidates, including the outputs of other machine learning models. We train reinforcement learning policies using deep neural networks, and compute top-K Gaussian propensity scores to exclude the variance in the gradients caused by randomness unrelated to the reward. This setup further facilitates us to automatically find accurate reward functions that trade off between budget spending and user engagements. In online A/B experiments on two major services of Facebook Home Feed, Groups You Should Join and Friend Requests, our method statistically significantly boosted the number of groups joined by 14.7%, the number of friend requests accepted by 7.0%, and the number of daily active Facebook users by about 1 million, against strong hand-tuned baselines that have been iterated in production over years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crop Recommendation Systems are invaluable tools for farmers, assisting them in making informed decisions about crop selection to optimize yields. These systems leverage a wealth of data, including soil characteristics, historical crop performance, and prevailing weather patterns, to provide personalized recommendations. In response to the growing demand for transparency and interpretability in agricultural decision-making, this study introduces XAI-CROP an innovative algorithm that harnesses eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) principles. The fundamental objective of XAI-CROP is to empower farmers with comprehensible insights into the recommendation process, surpassing the opaque nature of conventional machine learning models. The study rigorously compares XAI-CROP with prominent machine learning models, including Gradient Boosting (GB), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), and Multimodal Naïve Bayes (MNB). Performance evaluation employs three essential metrics: Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and R-squared (R2). The empirical results unequivocally establish the superior performance of XAI-CROP. It achieves an impressively low MSE of 0.9412, indicating highly accurate crop yield predictions. Moreover, with an MAE of 0.9874, XAI-CROP consistently maintains errors below the critical threshold of 1, reinforcing its reliability. The robust R2 value of 0.94152 underscores XAI-CROP's ability to explain 94.15% of the data's variability, highlighting its interpretability and explanatory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel federated recommendation framework that incorporates differential privacy to safeguard user privacy without compromising on the accuracy of recommendations. Unlike conventional recommendation systems that centralize user data, leading to potential privacy breaches, our framework ensures that user data remain on local devices. It leverages a federated learning approach, where a global model is trained across multiple devices without exchanging raw data. To enhance privacy protection, we integrate a specially designed differential privacy algorithm that adds carefully calibrated noise to the aggregated data updates. This mechanism ensures that the global model cannot be exploited to infer individual user information. We evaluate our framework on two real-world datasets, one from the e-commerce sector and another from the multimedia content recommendation domain. The results exhibit that our framework achieves competitive recommendation accuracy compared to traditional centralized approaches, with minimal loss in precision and recall metrics, while significantly enhancing user privacy. Our work stands as a testament to the feasibility of creating recommendation systems that do not have to choose between privacy and performance, paving the way for more ethical AI applications in sensitive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early identification of safe and efficacious disease targets is crucial to alleviating the tremendous cost of drug discovery projects. However, existing experimental methods for identifying new targets are generally labor-intensive and failure-prone. On the other hand, computational approaches, especially the machine learning-based frameworks, have shown remarkable application potential in drug discovery. In this work, we propose Progeni, a novel machine learning-based framework for target identification. In addition to fully exploiting the known heterogeneous biological networks from various sources, Progeni integrates literature evidence about the relations between biological entities to construct a probabilistic knowledge graph. Graph neural networks are then employed in Progeni to learn the feature embeddings of biological entities to facilitate the identification of biologically relevant target candidates. A comprehensive evaluation of Progeni demonstrated its superior predictive power over the baseline methods on the target identification task. In addition, our extensive tests showed that Progeni exhibited high robustness to the negative effect of exposure bias, a common phenomenon in recommendation systems, and effectively identified new targets that can be strongly supported by the literature. Moreover, our wet lab experiments successfully validated the biological significance of the top target candidates predicted by Progeni for melanoma and colorectal cancer. All these results suggested that Progeni can identify biologically effective targets and thus provide a powerful and useful tool for advancing the drug discovery process. Author summary: The selection of a disease target, a biological entity with which potential drugs interact to treat diseases, is often the first step of a drug discovery project. Known to be extremely costly, drug discovery projects spend tremendous resources on failed drug instances, most of which result from inadequate choices of targets. To help address the costliness problem of drug discovery, we developed a machine learning-based framework that identifies biologically effective targets using a probabilistic knowledge graph built from both biological network data and literature evidence. Our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods on the target prediction task, but can also identify targets with high biological relevance, as shown by the strong support of the literature for the predicted target candidates and wet lab experiments that validate the significance of the predicted target candidates for melanoma and colorectal cancer, These results suggest that our method can identify effective targets and therefore benefit drug discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks are widely used platforms for sharing various information and content, including text, images, and videos.The main challenge in social networking today is the verification of data credibility and the identification of genuine social media profiles. Cybercriminals take advantage of this by utilizing fake profiles to disseminate false information. However, current research mainly concentrates on spam filtering and analyzing malicious behavior separately, disregarding the interrelated nature of these issues. We propose a more desirable global, hybrid solution that encompasses both malicious profile detection and spam detection to mitigate the spread of spam effectively. This paper offers a deep learning-based method for detecting malicious profiles and spam tweets. For the profiles to interact with them as legitimate profiles, we first provide the detection of fake profiles using an automated honeypot. Next, we detect those who make interactions as malicious profiles, and finally, we collect their shared content to find spam tweets using a convolution neural network algorithm. We suggest using collaborative filtering and content filtering algorithms from recommender systems to define accounts similar to harmful profiles and spam similar to spam material picked up by convolution neural networks. We get a highly compelling and intriguing outcome with higher accuracy (99.23%) and lesser loss than typical learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of advancements in information technology and the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer behavior has undergone a significant transformation, shifting from traditional in-store shopping to the realm of online retailing. This shift has notably accelerated the growth of the online retail sector. An essential advantage offered by e-commerce lies in its ability to accumulate and analyze user data, encompassing browsing and purchase histories, through its recommendation systems. Nevertheless, prevailing methodologies predominantly rely on historical user data, which often lack the dynamism required to comprehend immediate user responses and emotional states during online interactions. Recognizing the substantial influence of visual stimuli on human perception, this study leverages eye-tracking technology to investigate online consumer behavior. The research captures the visual engagement of 60 healthy participants while they engage in online shopping, while also taking note of their preferred items for purchase. Subsequently, we apply statistical analysis and machine learning models to unravel the impact of visual complexity, consumer considerations, and preferred items, thereby providing valuable insights for the design of e-commerce platforms. Our findings indicate that the integration of eye-tracking data into e-commerce recommendation systems is conducive to enhancing their performance. Furthermore, machine learning algorithms exhibited remarkable classification capabilities when combined with eye-tracking data. Notably, during the purchase of hedonic products, participants primarily fixated on product images, whereas for utilitarian products, equal attention was dedicated to images, prices, reviews, and sales volume. These insights hold significant potential to augment the effectiveness of e-commerce marketing endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a novel smart property recommendation system that takes into account crucial parameters of a particular area like pollution level (air and water quality index, and noise), crime rate, crowd cover, average traffic congestion level, proximity to markets, hospitals, schools and transport, happiness index, cleanliness, greenery and site rating, and updates these real-time data continuously through Internet of Things (IoT) devices and artificial intelligence (AI) models to the cloud database. Different machine learning (ML) algorithms recommend properties to the users based on their personalized set of choices, location and budget. The system also generates an alarm to notify the respective authorities if any anomaly is detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, there is a significant amount of research being conducted in the field of artificial intelligence to improve the explainability and interpretability of deep learning models. It is found that if end-users understand the reason for the production of some output, it is easier to trust the system. Recommender systems are one example of systems that great efforts have been conducted to make their output more explainable. One method for producing a more explainable output is using counterfactual reasoning, which involves altering minimal features to generate a counterfactual item that results in changing the output of the system. This process allows the identification of input features that have a significant impact on the desired output, leading to effective explanations. In this paper, we present a method for generating counterfactual explanations for both tabular and textual features. We evaluated the performance of our proposed method on three real-world datasets and demonstrated a +5% improvement on finding effective features (based on model-based measures) compared to the baseline method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information access systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants, have become integral to our daily lives as they help us satisfy our information needs. However, evaluating the effectiveness of these systems presents a long-standing and complex scientific challenge. This challenge is rooted in the difficulty of assessing a system's overall effectiveness in assisting users to complete tasks through interactive support, and further exacerbated by the substantial variation in user behaviour and preferences. To address this challenge, user simulation emerges as a promising solution. This monograph focuses on providing a thorough understanding of user simulation techniques designed specifically for evaluation purposes. We begin with a background of information access system evaluation and explore the diverse applications of user simulation. Subsequently, we systematically review the major research progress in user simulation, covering both general frameworks for designing user simulators, utilizing user simulation for evaluation, and specific models and algorithms for simulating user interactions with search engines, recommender systems, and conversational assistants. Realizing that user simulation is an interdisciplinary research topic, whenever possible, we attempt to establish connections with related fields, including machine learning, dialogue systems, user modeling, and economics. We end the monograph with a broad discussion of important future research directions, many of which extend beyond the evaluation of information access systems and are expected to have broader impact on how to evaluate interactive intelligent systems in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing human activity (HAR) from data in a smartphone sensor plays an important role in the field of health to prevent chronic diseases. Daily and weekly physical activities are recorded on the smartphone and tell the user whether he is moving well or not. Typically, smartphones and their associated sensing devices operate in distributed and unstable environments. Therefore, collecting their data and extracting useful information is a significant challenge. In this context, the aimof this paper is twofold: The first is to analyze human behavior based on the recognition of physical activities. Using the results of physical activity detection and classification, the second part aims to develop a health recommendation system to notify smartphone users about their healthy physical behavior related to their physical activities. This system is based on the calculation of calories burned by each user during physical activities. In this way, conclusions can be drawn about a person's physical behavior by estimating the number of calories burned after evaluating data collected daily or even weekly following a series of physical workouts. To identify and classify human behavior our methodology is based on artificial intelligence models specifically deep learning techniques like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), stacked LSTM, and bidirectional LSTM. Since human activity data contains both spatial and temporal information, we proposed, in this paper, to use of an architecture allowing the extraction of the two types of information simultaneously. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has an architecture designed for spatial information, our idea is to combine CNN with LSTM to increase classification accuracy by taking into consideration the extraction of both spatial and temporal data. The results obtained achieved an accuracy of 96%. On the other side, the data learned by these algorithms is prone to error and uncertainty. To overcome this constraint and improve performance (96%), we proposed to use the fusion mechanisms. The last combines deep learning classifiers tomodel non-accurate and ambiguous data to obtain synthetic information to aid in decision-making. The Voting and Dempster-Shafer (DS) approaches are employed. The results showed that fused classifiers based on DS theory outperformed individual classifiers (96%) with the highest accuracy level of 98%. Also, the findings disclosed that participants engaging in physical activities are healthy, showcasing a disparity in the distribution of physical activities between men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the intricacies of booking behaviors, focusing on the preference for tropical coastal cities during colder seasons, given the burgeoning need for personalized and intelligent travel recommendations in the modern tourism landscape. Traditional booking systems, with their static algorithms, have often neglected the dynamic interplay of environmental factors and user preferences, necessitating an evolution towards more sophisticated, adaptive models. To address this, the research employed advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, amalgamating data from diverse sources like major tourism websites, hotel platforms, and social media. The methodology involved meticulous data preprocessing to ensure data quality and depth, followed by the implementation of deep learning models and time series analysis, which were instrumental in deciphering complex patterns and offering predictive insights. This comprehensive approach facilitated the integration of various environmental factors such as weather conditions and temporal events, enabling the system to craft hyper-personalized recommendations that resonate with user preferences and environmental nuances. The findings were illuminating, unveiling a significant inverse relationship between temperature and bookings and highlighting the influential role of temporal events in driving bookings. The advanced predictive models showcased commendable accuracy, underscoring the transformative potential of such intelligent systems in enhancing user experiences and engagement in the tourism sector. These insights pave the way for the development of innovative strategies that can significantly elevate user satisfaction and industry growth. The study concludes that the integration of machine learning and AI in booking systems can revolutionize the tourism industry by offering unprecedented levels of personalization and adaptability, catering to the diverse and evolving needs of modern travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of e-commerce platforms has emphasized the significance of personalized recommendation systems in enhancing user engagement and satisfaction. This research paper presents the development and evaluation of an innovative Product Recommendation System that leverages advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to provide tailored product suggestions. The primary objective is to create a user-centric experience by integrating an AI assistant, enabling natural and interactive interactions. Through a comprehensive survey conducted to understand customer behaviour while purchasing product using AI, the study aims to assess the system's effectiveness in delivering accurate recommendations and providing a seamless purchasing experience. The paper contributes to the field by showcasing the practical implementation of AI-driven recommendation systems, highlighting their potential to transform e-commerce interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, recommender systems have acquired significant popularity as a solution to the issue of information overload. These systems offer personalised recommendations to users. The superiority of multi-criteria recommender systems over their single-criterion counterparts has been demonstrated, as the former are able to provide more precise recommendations by taking into account multiple dimensions of user preferences when rating items. The prevalent recommendation technique, matrix factorization of collaborative filtering, is hindered by the data sparsity problem of the user-item matrix. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that deep learning techniques have demonstrated significant potential in various research domains, including but not limited to image processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. In recent times, there has been a surge in the utilisation of deep learning techniques in recommender systems, yielding promising outcomes. This study presents a novel approach to multi-criteria recommender systems through the utilisation of deep learning algorithms to mitigate the data sparsity issue. Specifically, deep autoencoders are utilised to uncover complex, non-linear, and latent relationships between users' multi-criteria preferences followed by matrix factorization technique, ultimately leading to more precise recommendations. The proposed model is evaluated by conducting the experiments on the multi-criteria dataset of Yahoo! Movies. According to the outcomes, the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art recommendation methods by generating more accurate and personalized recommendations. Also, it reduces the data sparsity up to 11% from the multi-criteria dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Tourism is an important sector, serving as an avenue to show the natural resources of a country and inhabitants' hospitality. This sector creates several opportunities for building a potential market and enhancing economic activities where tourist spots and activities flourish. Despite the numerous benefits, tourism still requires significant improvement, particularly in the Philippines, where there are abundant beautiful places. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a recommender system based on users and content collaborative filtering to provide local and foreign tourists with viable information for experience improvement. The investigation focused on improving tourist satisfaction based on three aspects such as preferences, ratings, and reviews that add options for tourist spots, activities/itineraries, destinations, and others. The machine algorithm-based journey assistant (MAJA) was designed as an interface and agent in providing help to tourists. The mean average precision (MAP) and recall were used as evaluation metrics to better understand the ability of MAJA to offer personalized experiences to unique users. The results showed that integration of the system into tourism provided a smart platform for enhancing tourist experience and destination competitiveness. Consequently, successful implementation of the system is measured by two criteria, namely the degree of tourists' pleasure during trip and the capacity of MAJA to effectively transfer tourism to less popular and less "accessible" sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose to use a convertible deep neural network (DNN) model with a transfer adaptation mechanism to deal with varying input and output numbers of neurons. The flexible DNN model serves as a multi-label classifier for the recommender system as part of the retrieval systems' push mechanism, which learns the combination of tabular features and proposes the number of discrete offers (targets). Our retrieval system uses the transfer adaptation, mechanism, when the number of features changes, it replaces the input layer of the neural network then freezes all gradients on the following layers, trains only replaced layer, and unfreezes the entire model. The experiments show that using the transfer adaptation technique impacts stable loss decreasing and learning speed during the training process. Furthermore, our proposed model demonstrates notable advantages in production scenarios. Specifically, it exhibits enhanced efficiency, manifesting in accelerated processing times and improved resource utilization, thereby contributing to a more sustainable and cost-effective training of machine learning solutions in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: Generating recommendations of compatible dating partners is a challenging task for online dating platforms because uncovering users' idiosyncratic preferences is difficult. Thus, platforms tend to recommend popular users to others more frequently than unpopular users. This paper studies such popularity bias in an online dating platform's recommendations and its consequences for users' likelihood of finding dating partners. Methodology/results: Motivated by the empirical evidence that a user's chance of being recommended by the platform's algorithm increases significantly with the user's popularity, we study an online dating platform's incentive that generates popularity bias by modeling the platform's recommendations and users' subsequent interactions in a three-stage matching game. Our analysis shows that the recommendations that maximize the platform's revenue and those that maximize the number of successful matches between users are not necessarily at odds, even though the former leads to a higher bias against unpopular users. Unbiased recommendations result in significantly lower revenue for the platform and fewer matches when users' implicit cost of evaluating incoming messages is low. Popular users help the platform generate more revenue and a higher number of successful matches as long as these popular users do not become "out of reach." We validate our theoretical results by running simulations of the platform based on a machine learning–based predictive model that estimates users' behavior. Managerial implications: Our result indicates that an online dating platform can increase revenue and users' chances of finding dating partners simultaneously with a certain degree of bias against unpopular users. Online dating platforms can use our theoretical results to understand user behavior and our predictive model to improve their recommendation systems (e.g., by selecting a set of users leading to the highest probabilities of matching or other revenue-generating interactions). Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0132. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces a data-driven and machine-learning approach to design a personalized tourist recommendation system for Nepal. It examines key tourist attributes, such as demographics, behaviors, preferences, and satisfaction, to develop four sub-models for data collection and machine learning. A structured survey is conducted with 2400 international and domestic tourists, featuring 28 major questions and 125 variables. The data are preprocessed, and significant features are extracted to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the machine-learning models. These models are evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, ROC, and lift curves. A comprehensive database for Pokhara City, Nepal, is developed from various sources that includes attributes such as location, cost, popularity, rating, ranking, and trend. The machine-learning models provide intermediate categorical recommendations, which are further mapped using a personalized recommender algorithm. This algorithm makes decisions based on weights assigned to each decision attribute to make the final recommendations. The system's performance is compared with other popular recommender systems implemented by TripAdvisor, Google Maps, the Nepal tourism website, and others. It is found that the proposed system surpasses existing ones, offering more accurate and optimized recommendations to visitors in Pokhara. This study is a pioneering one and holds significant implications for the tourism industry and the governing sector of Nepal in enhancing the overall tourism business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the domain of data-centric networks, Link Prediction (LP) is instrumental in discerning potential or absent connections among entities within complex networks. By employing graph data structures, LP techniques enable a detailed analysis of entity interactions across varied sectors, contributing significantly to overcoming challenges in data filtering and integrity restoration, primarily when the network does not provide embedded data. Although LP methods are widely applicable, especially in recommender systems, their efficacy in current social networks needs to be thoroughly investigated. This study introduces an innovative LP approach using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). We compare our method against a comprehensive set of established techniques, including traditional score-based methods, classical baselines, and recent deep learning approaches like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Our DNN-based solution incorporates a robust feature extraction process and a binary classifier, optimized for accurate prediction of missing links within networks. We performed extensive experimental evaluations on diverse datasets, including co-authorship networks, e-commerce, and social media networks. The study encompasses a comparative analysis with traditional LP techniques, namely Common Neighbors, Resource Allocation Index, Jaccard’s Coefficient, and Adamic/Adar Index, as well as other selected baseline and deep-learning methods. Our findings demonstrate that the DNN-based approach significantly enhances predictive accuracy, outperforming the conventional baseline methods in link prediction.

While recommender systems have become an integral component of the Web experience, their heavy reliance on user data raises privacy and security concerns. Substituting user data with synthetic data can address these concerns, but accurately replicating these real-world datasets has been a notoriously challenging problem. Recent advancements in generative AI have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of diffusion models in generating realistic data across various domains. In this work we introduce a Score-based Diffusion Recommendation Module (SDRM), which captures the intricate patterns of real-world datasets required for training highly accurate recommender systems. SDRM allows for the generation of synthetic data that can replace existing datasets to preserve user privacy, or augment existing datasets to address excessive data sparsity. Our method outperforms competing baselines such as generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and recently proposed diffusion models in synthesizing various datasets to replace or augment the original data by an average improvement of 4.30% in Recall@ $k$ and 4.65% in NDCG@ $k$ .

The role of academic advising has been conducted by faculty-student advisors, who often have many students to advise quickly, making the process ineffective. The selection of the incorrect qualification increases the risk of dropping out, changing qualifications, or not finishing the qualification enrolled in the minimum time. This study harnesses a real-world dataset comprising student records across four engineering disciplines from the 2016 and 2017 academic years at a public South African university. The study examines the relative importance of features in models for predicting student performance and determining whether students are better suited for extended or mainstream programmes. The study employs a three-step methodology, encompassing data pre-processing, feature importance selection, and model training with evaluation, to predict student performance by addressing issues such as dataset imbalance, biases, and ethical considerations. By relying exclusively on high school performance data, predictions are based solely on students' abilities, fostering fairness and minimising biases in predictive tasks. The results show that removing demographic features like ethnicity or nationality reduces bias. The study's findings also highlight the significance of the following features: mathematics, physical sciences, and admission point scores when predicting student performance. The models are evaluated, demonstrating their ability to provide accurate predictions. The study's results highlight varying performance among models and their key contributions, underscoring the potential to transform academic advising and enhance student decision-making. These models can be incorporated into the academic advising recommender system, thereby improving the quality of academic guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of academic expert finding, this paper investigates and compares the performance of information retrieval (IR) and machine learning (ML) methods, including deep learning, to approach the problem of identifying academic figures who are experts in different domains when a potential user requests their expertise. IR-based methods construct multifaceted textual profiles for each expert by clustering information from their scientific publications. Several methods fully tailored for this problem are presented in this paper. In contrast, ML-based methods treat expert finding as a classification task, training automatic text classifiers using publications authored by experts. By comparing these approaches, we contribute to a deeper understanding of academic-expert-finding techniques and their applicability in knowledge discovery. These methods are tested with two large datasets from the biomedical field: PMSC-UGR and CORD-19. The results show how IR techniques were, in general, more robust with both datasets and more suitable than the ML-based ones, with some exceptions showing good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]