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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]

The rise of social media has changed how people view connections. Machine Learning (ML)-based sentiment analysis and news categorization help understand emotions and access news. However, most studies focus on complex models requiring heavy resources and slowing inference times, making deployment difficult in resource-limited environments. In this paper, we process both structured and unstructured data, determining the polarity of text using the TextBlob scheme to determine the sentiment of news headlines. We propose a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)-based Ridge classifier (RC) for blending SGDR with an advanced string processing technique to effectively classify news articles. Additionally, we explore existing supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms to gauge the effectiveness of our SGDR classifier. The scalability and generalization capability of SGD and L2 regularization techniques in RCs to handle overfitting and balance bias and variance provide the proposed SGDR with better classification capability. Experimental results highlight that our string processing pipeline significantly boosts the performance of all ML models. Notably, our ensemble SGDR classifier surpasses all state-of-the-art ML algorithms, achieving an impressive 98.12% accuracy. McNemar's significance tests reveal that our SGDR classifier achieves a 1% significance level improvement over K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, and AdaBoost and a 5% significance level improvement over other algorithms. These findings underscore the superior proficiency of linear models in news categorization compared to tree-based and nonlinear counterparts. This study contributes valuable insights into the efficacy of the proposed methodology, elucidating its potential for news categorization and sentiment analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetes is a persistent metabolic disorder linked to elevated levels of blood glucose, commonly referred to as blood sugar. This condition can have detrimental effects on the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, and nerves as time passes. It is a chronic ailment that arises when the body fails to produce enough insulin or is unable to effectively use the insulin it produces. When diabetes is not properly managed, it often leads to hyperglycemia, a condition characterized by elevated blood sugar levels or impaired glucose tolerance. This can result in significant harm to various body systems, including the nerves and blood vessels. In this paper, we propose a multiclass diabetes mellitus detection and classification approach using an extremely imbalanced Laboratory of Medical City Hospital data dynamics. We also formulate a new dataset that is moderately imbalanced based on the Laboratory of Medical City Hospital data dynamics. To correctly identify the multiclass diabetes mellitus, we employ three machine learning classifiers namely support vector machine, logistic regression, and k-nearest neighbor. We also focus on dimensionality reduction (feature selection—filter, wrapper, and embedded method) to prune the unnecessary features and to scale up the classification performance. To optimize the classification performance of classifiers, we tune the model by hyperparameter optimization with 10-fold grid search cross-validation. In the case of the original extremely imbalanced dataset with 70:30 partition and support vector machine classifier, we achieved maximum accuracy of 0.964, precision of 0.968, recall of 0.964, F1-score of 0.962, Cohen kappa of 0.835, and AUC of 0.99 by using top 4 feature according to filter method. By using the top 9 features according to wrapper-based sequential feature selection, the k-nearest neighbor provides an accuracy of 0.935 and 1.0 for the other performance metrics. For our created moderately imbalanced dataset with an 80:20 partition, the SVM classifier achieves a maximum accuracy of 0.938, and 1.0 for other performance metrics. For the multiclass diabetes mellitus detection and classification, our experiments outperformed conducted research based on the Laboratory of Medical City Hospital data dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hyperspectral Image (HSI) is a great source of information for observing the earth's elements due to its numerous narrow and continuous spectral wavelength bands. There are some key difficulties, such as the fact that the image bands are spectrally and spatially highly correlated, and the 'curse of dimensionality' in using the original HSI for classification. Band (dimensionality/feature) reduction is necessary to improve classification performance through feature extraction and selection. As such, this paper proposes a hybrid HSI classification paradigm, termed Hybrid-2DNET. Specifically, our proposed Hybrid-2DNET incorporates factor analysis-based feature extraction along the Minimum-Redundancy-Maximum-Relevance (mRMR)-based feature selection criterion and a 2D-wavelet Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to reduce both spectral and spatial dimensionalities. The experimental analyses performed on three remote sensings HSI datasets, namely Indian Pines, University of Pavia, and Salinas Scene, manifest that our proposed Hybrid-2DNET outperforms the handcrafted and deep learning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification is a predictive modelling task in machine learning (ML), where the class label is determined for a specific example of predefined features. In determining handwriting characters, identifying spam, detecting disease, identifying signals, and so on, classification requires training data with many features and label instances. In medical informatics, high precision and recall are mandatory issues besides the high accuracy of the ML classifiers. Most of the real-life datasets have imbalanced characteristics that hamper the overall performance of the classifiers. Existing data balancing techniques perform the whole dataset at a time that sometimes causes overfitting and underfitting. We propose a data balancing technique that follows the divide and conquer procedure to cluster the dataset into several segments, and both oversampling and undersampling operation is performed on each cluster. Finally, the cluster joined together and built a balanced dataset. We chose the sample data of two heart disease datasets: Hungarian and Long Beach. Logistic regression and random forest classifier are the representatives of ML algorithms. We compare our proposed techniques with existing SMOTE, NearMiss, and SMOTETomek data balancing techniques. Both algorithms perform better on the proposed technique-balanced dataset. This technique can be the optimal solution for the imbalanced data handling strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is the most critical sector for food supply on the earth, and it is also responsible for supplying raw materials for other industrial productions. Currently, the growth in agricultural production is not sufficient to keep up with the growing population, which may result in a food shortfall for the world’s inhabitants. As a result, increasing food production is crucial for developing nations with limited land and resources. It is essential to select a suitable crop for a specific region to increase its production rate. Effective crop production forecasting in that area based on historical data, including environmental and cultivation areas, and crop production amount, is required. However, the data for such forecasting are not publicly available. As such, in this paper, we take a case study of a developing country, Bangladesh, whose economy relies on agriculture. We first gather and preprocess the data from the relevant research institutions of Bangladesh and then propose an ensemble machine learning approach, called K-nearest Neighbor Random Forest Ridge Regression (KRR), to effectively predict the production of the major crops (three different kinds of rice, potato, and wheat). KRR is designed after investigating five existing traditional machine learning (Support Vector Regression, Naïve Bayes, and Ridge Regression) and ensemble learning (Random Forest and CatBoost) algorithms. We consider four classical evaluation metrics, i.e., mean absolute error, mean square error (MSE), root MSE, and R², to evaluate the performance of the proposed KRR over the other machine learning models. It shows 0.009 MSE, 99% R² for Aus; 0.92 MSE, 90% R² for Aman; 0.246 MSE, 99% R² for Boro; 0.062 MSE, 99% R² for wheat; and 0.016 MSE, 99% R² for potato production prediction. The Diebold–Mariano test is conducted to check the robustness of the proposed ensemble model, KRR. In most cases, it shows 1% and 5% significance compared to the benchmark ML models. Lastly, we design a recommender system that suggests suitable crops for a specific land area for cultivation in the next season. We believe that the proposed paradigm will help the farmers and personnel in the agricultural sector leverage proper crop cultivation and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object classification in hyperspectral images involves accurately categorizing objects based on their spectral characteristics. However, the high dimensionality of hyperspectral data and class imbalance pose significant challenges to object classification performance. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that incorporates dimensionality reduction and re-sampling as preprocessing steps for a deep learning model. Our framework employs a novel subgroup-based dimensionality reduction technique to extract and select the most informative features with minimal redundancy. Additionally, the data are resampled to achieve class balance across all categories. The reduced and balanced data are then processed through a hybrid CNN model, which combines a 3D learning block and a 2D learning block to extract spectral–spatial features and achieve satisfactory classification accuracy. By adopting this hybrid approach, we simplify the model while improving performance in the presence of noise and limited sample size. We evaluated our proposed model on the Salinas scene, Pavia University, and Kennedy Space Center benchmark hyperspectral datasets, comparing it to state-of-the-art methods. Our object classification technique achieves highly promising results, with overall accuracies of 99.98%, 99.94%, and 99.46% on the three datasets, respectively. This proposed approach offers a compelling solution to overcome the challenges of high dimensionality and class imbalance in hyperspectral object classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning (FL) has experienced a boom in recent years, which is jointly promoted by the prosperity of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence along with emerging privacy issues. In the FL paradigm, a central server and local end devices maintain the same model by exchanging model updates instead of raw data, with which the privacy of data stored on end devices is not directly revealed. In this way, the privacy violation caused by the growing collection of sensitive data can be mitigated. However, the performance of FL with a central server is reaching a bottleneck, while new threats are emerging simultaneously. There are various reasons, among which the most significant ones are centralized processing, data falsification, and lack of incentives. To accelerate the proliferation of FL, blockchain-enabled FL has attracted substantial attention from both academia and industry. A considerable number of novel solutions are devised to meet the emerging demands of diverse scenarios. Blockchain-enabled FL provides both theories and techniques to improve the performance of FL from various perspectives. In this survey, we will comprehensively summarize and evaluate existing variants of blockchain-enabled FL, identify the emerging challenges, and propose potentially promising research directions in this under-explored domain. [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]