No Arabic abstract
The sudden change in the landscape of Philippine education, including the implementation of K to 12 program, Higher Education institutions, have been struggling in attracting freshmen applicants coupled with difficulties in projecting incoming enrollees. Private HEIs Enrolment target directly impacts success factors of Higher Education Institutions. A review of the various characteristics of freshman applicants influencing their admission status at a Philippine university were included in this study. The dataset used was obtained from the Admissions Office of the University via an online form which was circulated to all prospective applicants. Using Logistic Regression, a predictive model was developed to determine the likelihood that an enrolled student would seek enrolment in the institution or not based on both students and institutions characteristics. The LR Model was used as the algorithm in the development of the Decision Support System. Weka was utilized on selection of features and building the LR model. The DSS was coded and designed using R Studio and R Shiny which includes data visualization and individual prediction.
With the recent implementation of the K to 12 Program, academic institutions, specifically, Colleges and Universities in the Philippines have been faced with difficulties in determining projected freshmen enrollees vis-a-vis decision-making factors for efficient resource management. Enrollment targets directly impacts success factors of Higher Education Institutions. This study covered an analysis of various characteristics of freshmen applicants affecting their admission status in a Philippine university. A predictive model was developed using Logistic Regression to evaluate the probability that an admitted student will pursue to enroll in the Institution or not. The dataset used was acquired from the University Admissions Office. The office designed an online application form to capture applicants details. The online form was distributed to all student applicants, and most often, students, tend to provide incomplete information. Despite this fact, student characteristics, as well as geographic and demographic data based on the students location are significant predictors of enrollment decision. The results of the study show that given limited information about prospective students, Higher Education Institutions can implement machine learning techniques to supplement management decisions and provide estimates of class sizes, in this way, it will allow the institution to optimize the allocation of resources and will have better control over net tuition revenue.
In higher educational institutes, many students have to struggle hard to complete different courses since there is no dedicated support offered to students who need special attention in the registered courses. Machine learning techniques can be utilized for students grades prediction in different courses. Such techniques would help students to improve their performance based on predicted grades and would enable instructors to identify such individuals who might need assistance in the courses. In this paper, we use Collaborative Filtering (CF), Matrix Factorization (MF), and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) techniques to systematically analyze a real-world data collected from Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, Pakistan. We evaluate the academic performance of ITU students who got admission in the bachelors degree program in ITUs Electrical Engineering department. The RBM technique is found to be better than the other techniques used in predicting the students performance in the particular course.
Skill shortages are a drain on society. They hamper economic opportunities for individuals, slow growth for firms, and impede labor productivity in aggregate. Therefore, the ability to understand and predict skill shortages in advance is critical for policy-makers and educators to help alleviate their adverse effects. This research implements a high-performing Machine Learning approach to predict occupational skill shortages. In addition, we demonstrate methods to analyze the underlying skill demands of occupations in shortage and the most important features for predicting skill shortages. For this work, we compile a unique dataset of both Labor Demand and Labor Supply occupational data in Australia from 2012 to 2018. This includes data from 7.7 million job advertisements (ads) and 20 official labor force measures. We use these data as explanatory variables and leverage the XGBoost classifier to predict yearly skills shortage classifications for 132 standardized occupations. The models we construct achieve macro-F1 average performance scores of up to 83 per cent. Our results show that job ads data and employment statistics were the highest performing feature sets for predicting year-to-year skills shortage changes for occupations. We also find that features such as Hours Worked, years of Education, years of Experience, and median Salary are highly important features for predicting occupational skill shortages. This research provides a robust data-driven approach for predicting and analyzing skill shortages, which can assist policy-makers, educators, and businesses to prepare for the future of work.
Preventing Veteran suicide is a national priority. The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) collects, analyzes, and publishes data to inform suicide prevention strategies. Current approaches for detecting suicidal ideation mostly rely on patient self report which are inadequate and time consuming. In this research study, our goal was to automate suicidal ideation detection from acoustic and linguistic features of an individuals speech using machine learning (ML) algorithms. Using voice data collected from Veterans enrolled in a large interventional study on Gulf War Illness at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, we conducted an evaluation of the performance of different ML approaches in achieving our objective. By fitting both classical ML and deep learning models to the dataset, we identified the algorithms that were most effective for each feature set. Among classical machine learning algorithms, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) trained on acoustic features performed best in classifying suicidal Veterans. Among deep learning methods, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on the linguistic features performed best. Our study shows that speech analysis in a machine learning pipeline is a promising approach for detecting suicidality among Veterans.
The current study uses a network analysis approach to explore the STEM pathways that students take through their final year of high school in Aotearoa New Zealand. By accessing individual-level microdata from New Zealands Integrated Data Infrastructure, we are able to create a co-enrolment network comprised of all STEM assessment standards taken by students in New Zealand between 2010 and 2016. We explore the structure of this co-enrolment network though use of community detection and a novel measure of entropy. We then investigate how network structure differs across sub-populations based on students sex, ethnicity, and the socio-economic-status (SES) of the high school they attended. Results show the structure of the STEM co-enrolment network differs across these sub-populations, and also changes over time. We find that, while female students were more likely to have been enrolled in life science standards, they were less well represented in physics, calculus, and vocational (e.g., agriculture, practical technology) standards. Our results also show that the enrolment patterns of the Maori and Pacific Islands sub-populations had higher levels of entropy, an observation that may be explained by fewer enrolments in key science and mathematics standards. Through further investigation of this disparity, we find that ethnic group differences in entropy are moderated by high school SES, such that the difference in entropy between Maori and Pacific Islands students, and European and Asian students is even greater. We discuss these findings in the context of the New Zealand education system and policy changes that occurred between 2010 and 2016.