Publication Details

Ouroboros: Early identification of at-risk students without models based on legacy data

HLOSTA Martin, ZDRÁHAL Zdeněk and ZENDULKA Jaroslav. Ouroboros: Early identification of at-risk students without models based on legacy data. In: LAK '17 Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference. Vancouver: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017, pp. 6-15. ISBN 978-1-4503-4870-6. Available from: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3027449
Czech title
Ouroboros: Brzká identifikace rizikových studentů na základě modelů bez použití historických dat
Type
conference paper
Language
english
Authors
Hlosta Martin, Ing. (DIFS FIT BUT)
Zdráhal Zdeněk (OPEN)
Zendulka Jaroslav, doc. Ing., CSc. (DIFS FIT BUT)
URL
Keywords

Student Retention, Predictive Analytics, Self-Learning, Imbalanced data, Learning Analytics

Abstract


This paper focuses on the problem of identifying students, who are at risk of failing their courses, with the absence of the data from previous runs of the courses, which are usually used for training the machine learning models. This problem is typically related to newly opened courses. To tackle this issue we present the "Ouroboros" based on the concept of "Self-Learning". It builds the machine learning models from the data in the currently running course. Moreover most of the students who fail the course withdraw in the first weeks of the course, therefore the focus is on identifying at-risk students as early as possible. The approach utilises information about already submitted assessments. This raises another problem that needs to be treated -- the presence of imbalanced data for training and testing the classification models. 


There are three main contributions in this paper -- 1) the concept of training the models for identifying at-risk students using the data from the same running course, 2) specifying the problem as a classification task and 3) tackling the problem of imbalanced data, which appears both in training and testing set.


The results prove  validity of the concept and show that it stands a comparison with traditional approaches of learning the models from legacy course data.

Published
2017
Pages
6-15
Proceedings
LAK '17 Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference
Conference
Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference, Vancouver, CA
ISBN
978-1-4503-4870-6
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Place
Vancouver, CA
DOI
UT WoS
000570180700002
EID Scopus
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{FITPUB11238,
   author = "Martin Hlosta and Zden\v{e}k Zdr\'{a}hal and Jaroslav Zendulka",
   title = "Ouroboros: Early identification of at-risk students without models based on legacy data",
   pages = "6--15",
   booktitle = "LAK '17 Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics \& Knowledge Conference",
   year = 2017,
   location = "Vancouver, CA",
   publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
   ISBN = "978-1-4503-4870-6",
   doi = "10.1145/3027385.3027449",
   language = "english",
   url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/11238"
}
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