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Educational Data Mining (EDM) holds promise in uncovering insights from educational data to predict and enhance students' performance. This paper presents an advanced EDM system tailored for classifying and improving tertiary students' programming skills. Our approach emphasizes effective feature engineering, appropriate classification techniques, and the integration of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to elucidate model decisions. Through rigorous experimentation, including an ablation study and evaluation of six machine learning algorithms, we introduce a novel ensemble method, Stacking-SRDA, which outperforms others in accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, ROC curve, and McNemar test. Leveraging XAI tools, we provide insights into model interpretability. Additionally, we propose a system for identifying skill gaps in programming among weaker students, offering tailored recommendations for skill enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral images (HSI) contain a wide range of information, the most prominent technology for observing the earth. However, using an original HSI high-dimensional datacube, the classification task faces significant challenges since it has a high computational cost. As a result, dimensionality reduction is indispensable. A dimension reduction method has been introduced in this paper, including feature extraction and feature selection to obtain feature subsets. Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF) is a popular feature extraction method for HSI, requiring a high computational capability. We propose a segmented MNF that divides the complete HSI into groups utilising normalised cross-cumulative residual entropy (nCCRE). An nCCRE-based feature selection is also employed to improve the quality of the chosen features using the max-relevancy min-redundancy measure. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used on two real HSI to evaluate the efficiency of the extracted subsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of hyperspectral imaging sensors has greatly improved the classification of remotely sensed data because of the abundant spectral information they offer. However, the numerous contiguous, tiny wavelength bands captured in hyperspectral images (HSIs) often hinder the classification process. To overcome the aforementioned problem, various feature reduction techniques, including feature extraction (FE) and feature selection (FS), are commonly employed to improve classification performance. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a well-established approach that has been utilized for the FE of HSI. LDA's consideration of global characteristics and the variance accumulator for FS can lead to the poor reduction of HIS's intrinsic characteristics. Furthermore, LDA's limited ability to select a very low number of features, i.e. the number of classes minus one, restricts its effectiveness in HSI classification. Therefore, we introduce an FS method based on a non-linear information-theoretic measure, normalized mutual information (nMI) combined with minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR). This approach is used to identify inherent features from the transformed space of our proposed correlation-based segmented-LDA (SLDA) and spectral region-based segmented-LDA (SSLDA) FE methods. We thoroughly compare the performance of the SLDA-mRMR and SSLDA-mRMR methods with the existing linear and non-linear state-of-the-art techniques, including unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA), PCA-based methods, supervised LDA, and LDA-based methods. Additionally, we explore the performance of nMI-based mRMR selection with all FE methods by incorporating a cumulative variance-based top features pick-up strategy. Based on the experimental results, we observe that SSLDA-mRMR and SLDA-mRMR achieve the highest classification accuracy, such as 91.91%, and 91.57% for agricultural Indian Pines, respectively, 97.66%, and 97.54%, respectively, for Kennedy Space Center, and 96.69%, and 96.57%, respectively, for Pavia University. In contrast, the classification accuracies using all original features of the HSIs are 71.39%, 70.01%, and 83.52%, respectively. Moreover, our proposed SSLDA-mRMR and SLDA-mRMR combinations outperformed all other FE and FS combinations that were examined using actual HSI datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational Data Mining (EDM) has become a promising research field for improving the quality of students and the education system. Although EDM dates back to several years, there is still lack of works for measuring and enhancing the computer programming skills of tertiary students. As such, we, in this paper, propose an EDM system for evaluating and improving tertiary students' programming skills. The proposed EDM system comprises two key modules for (i) classification process and (ii) learning process,. The classification module predicts the current status of a student and the learning process module helps generate respective suggestions and feedback to enhance the student's quality. In particular, for the classification module, we prepare a real dataset related to this task and evaluate the dataset to investigate six key Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, Support Vector Machine (SVM), decision tree, artificial neural network, Random Forest (RF), k -nearest neighbor and naive Bayes classifier, using accuracy-related performance measure metrics and goodness of the fit. The experimental results manifest that RF and SVM can predict the students more accurately than the other models. In addition, critical factors analysis is accomplished to identify the critical features toward achieving high classification accuracy. At last, we design an improvement mechanism in the learning process module that helps the students enhance their programming skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain notable information of land objects by acquiring an immense set of narrow and contiguous spectral bands. Feature extraction (FE) and feature selection (FS) as dimensionality (band) reduction strategies are performed to enhance the classification result of HSI. Principal component analysis (PCA) is frequently exploited for the FE of HSI. However, it often possesses the inability to extract local and subtle HSI structures. As such, segmented-PCA (SPCA), spectrally segmented-PCA (SSPCA) and folded-PCA (FPCA) are presented for local and useful FE from the HSI. In this paper, we propose two FE methods called segmented-FPCA (SFPCA) and spectrally segmented-FPCA (SSFPCA). SFPCA exploits SPCA and FPCA while SSFPCA exploits SSPCA and FPCA together. In particular, SFPCA and SSFPCA apply FPCA on highly correlated and spectrally grouped HSI bands, respectively. We consider nonlinear methods Kernel-PCA (KPCA) and Kernel entropy component analysis (KECA) for extended comparison. For the experimented agricultural Indian Pine and urban Washington DC Mall HSIs, the results manifest that SFPCA (95.6262% for the agricultural HSI and 97.4782% for the urban HSI) and SSFPCA (96.3221% for the agricultural HSI and 98.0116% for the urban HSI) outperform the conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The size of remote sensing (RS) image is indeed massive due to hundreds capturing wavelengths bands used for collecting information about the ground surface. The data in the RS images are often redundant spatially, spectrally and temporally which thus give a sufficient prospect for compressing the images in different domains. In this paper, we propose a band reordering scheme to be applied on the segmented subgroup datasets of an original RS image dataset towards presenting a hybrid lossless compression technique. The proposed dataset segmentation-based band reordering process employs two heuristics, i.e. consecutive continuity limit of previous bands and continuity breakdown thresholds to be used for efficient coding of reordered dataset towards attaining better on-board compression. The aim of the proposed compression strategy is thus to increase compression gain through reordering each highly correlated bands' segment in the RS data-cube for efficient coding. The performance of the proposed band reordering method is measured using the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) recommended lossless CCSDS 123.0-B-1 and three-dimensional (3D) Context-based Adaptive Lossless Image Codec (CALIC) predictors. The experimental results illustrate substantially higher compression of the proposed method than that of the state-of-the-art standards using various real RS hyperspectral and hyperspectral sound datasets. Quantitatively, the compression performances are increased by 0.10%–0.66% using CCSDS and 0.65–2.52% using 3D-CALIC for hyperspectral Airborne Visible InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) datasets, 0.26%–1.00% using CCSDS and 2.16–2.57% using 3D-CALIC for hyperspectral Hyperion datasets and 4.61%–7.36% using CCSDS and 4.05%–4.88% using 3D-CALIC for hyperspectral sounder datasets by the proposed compression technique. Besides, the proposed compression scheme outperforms state-of-the-art investigated compression methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image (HSI) usually holds information of land cover classes as a set of many contiguous narrow spectral wavelength bands. For its efficient thematic mapping or classification, band (feature) reduction strategies through Feature Extraction (FE) and/or Feature Selection (FS) methods for finding the intrinsic bands' information are typically applied. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a frequently employed unsupervised linear FE method whereas cumulative-variance accumulation is used for selecting top features from PCA data. However, PCA can fail to extract intrinsic structure of HSI due to global variance consideration and domination by visible and near infrared bands while cumulative-variance accumulation has no capability to exploit non-linear relationships among the transformed features produced by PCA-based FE methods. Consequently, we propose an information theoretic normalized Mutual Information (nMI)-based minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) non-linear measure to select the intrinsic features from the transformed space of our previously proposed Segmented-Folded-PCA (Seg-Fol-PCA) and Spectrally Segmented-Folded-PCA (SSeg-Fol-PCA) FE methods. We extensively analyse the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised FE and supervised FS combinations Seg-Fol-PCA-mRMR and SSeg-Fol-PCA-mRMR with that of PCA-based existing linear and non-linear state-of-the-art methods. In addition, cumulative variance-based top features pick-up strategy is considered with all FE methods and Renyi quadratic entropy-based FS is used with Kernel Entropy Component Analysis (Ker-ECA). The experimental results illustrate that SSeg-Fol-PCA-mRMR and Seg-Fol-PCA-mRMR obtain highest classification result e.g. 95.39% and 95.03% respectively for agricultural Indian Pines HSI, and 96.58% and 95.30% respectively for urban Washington DC Mall HSI while the classification accuracies using all original features of the HSIs are 70.28% and 91.90% respectively. Moreover, the proposed SSeg-Fol-PCA-mRMR and Seg-Fol-PCA-mRMR outperform all investigated combinations of FE and FS using the real HSI datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]