0000000000341412
AUTHOR
Lukas Pensel
Forecast of Study Success in the STEM Disciplines Based Solely on Academic Records
We present an approach to the forecast of the study success in selected STEM disciplines (computer science, mathematics, physics, and meteorology), solely based on the academic record of a student so far, without access to demographic or socioeconomic data. The purpose of the analysis is to improve student counseling, which may be essential for finishing a study program in one of the above mentioned fields. Technically, we show the successful use of propositionalization on relational data from educational data mining, based on standard aggregates and basic LSTM-trained aggregates.
Pairwise Learning to Rank by Neural Networks Revisited: Reconstruction, Theoretical Analysis and Practical Performance
We present a pairwise learning to rank approach based on a neural net, called DirectRanker, that generalizes the RankNet architecture. We show mathematically that our model is reflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive allowing for simplified training and improved performance. Experimental results on the LETOR MSLR-WEB10K, MQ2007 and MQ2008 datasets show that our model outperforms numerous state-of-the-art methods, while being inherently simpler in structure and using a pairwise approach only.