Many induction problems, such as on-line customer profiling, include missing data that can be acquired at a cost, such as incomplete customer information that can be filled in by an intermediary. For building accurate predictive models, acquiring complete information for all instances is often prohibitively expensive or unnecessary. Randomly selecting instances for feature acquisition allows a ...

When it comes to application of computational learning techniques in practical scenarios, like for example adaptive inferential control, it is often difficult to apply the state-of-the-art techniques in a straight forward manner and usually some effort has to be dedicated to tuning either the data, in a form of data pre-processing, or the modelling techniques, in form of optimal parameter searc...

We describe how statistical predictive models might play an expanded role in educational analytics by giving students automated, real-time information about what their current performance means for eventual success in eLearning environments. We discuss how an online messaging system might tailor information to individual students using predictive analytics. The proposed system would be data-dri...

As MOOCs become a major player in modern education, questions about how to improve their effectiveness and reach are of increasing importance. If machine learning and predictive analytics techniques promise to help teachers and MOOC providers customize the learning experience for students, differences between platforms, courses and iterations pose specific challenges. In this paper, we develop ...

Although the application of segmentation and predictive modeling is an important topic in the database marketing (DBM) literature, no study has yet investigated the extent of adoption of these techniques. We present the results of a Dutch survey involving 228 database marketing companies. We find that managers tend to rely on intuition and on the long-standing methods RFM and cross-tabulation. ...

Internet banking has become widely available in Jamaica and yet there have been few studies to understand the characteristics of its users. For banks to improve their service and similar services it becomes imperative that they can justify the costs associated with these services. One of the ways these costs can be justified is if their customer base of internet banking users was to increase, t...

Over the past few years, there has been a noticeable advancement in environmental models and information fusion systems taking advantage of the recent developments in sensor and mobile technologies. However, little attention has been paid so far to quantifying the relationship between environment changes and their impact on our bodies in real-life settings. In this paper, we identify a data dri...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) brings great opportunities to millions of learners. However, the size of the learner population and the heterogeneity of the learners' backgrounds make conventional one-size-fits-all pedagogy insufficient. For example, learners lacking in prior knowledge may struggle with different concepts. In this paper, we propose a framework educational content linking, t...

This paper describes stochastic modeling of pencoordinate information in HMMs with structured character pattern representation (SCPR) for on-line recognition of handwritten Japanese characters. SCPR allows HMMs for Kanji character patterns to share common subpatterns. Although SCPR-based HMMs have been successfully applied to Kanji character recognition, the pen-coordinate feature has not been ...

Comparing the performance of predictive models of student success has become a central task in the field of learning analytics. In this paper, we argue that research seeking to compare two predictive models requires a sound statistical approach for drawing valid inferences about comparisons between the performance of such models. We present an overview of work from the statistics and machine le...