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Course recommendations are important for improving learner satisfaction and reducing dropout rates on massive open online course (MOOC) platforms. This study aims to propose an interpretable method of analyzing students' learning behaviors and recommending MOOCs by integrating multiple data sources.

The study proposes a deep learning method of recommending MOOCs to students based on a multi-attention mechanism comprising learning records attention, word-level review attention, sentence-level review attention and course description attention. The proposed model is validated using real-world data consisting of the learning records of 6,628 students for 1,789 courses and 65,155 reviews.

The main contribution of this study is its exploration of multiple unstructured information using the proposed multi-attention network model. It provides an interpretable strategy for analyzing students' learning behaviors and conducting personalized MOOC recommendations.

The findings suggest that MOOC platforms must fully utilize the information implied in course reviews to extract personalized learning preferences.

This study is the first attempt to recommend MOOCs by exploring students' preferences in course reviews. The proposed multi-attention mechanism improves the interpretability of MOOC recommendations.

Engineering design and operational decisions depend largely on deep understanding of applications that requires assumptions for simplification of the problems in order to find proper solutions. Cutting-edge machine learning algorithms can be used as one of the emerging tools to simplify this process. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable and interpretable machine learning framework to automate this process and fill the current gap.

The essential principles of the proposed pipeline are mainly (1) scalability, (2) interpretibility and (3) robust probabilistic performance across engineering problems. The lack of interpretibility of complex machine learning models prevents their use in various problems including engineering computation assessments. Many consumers of machine learning models would not trust the results if they cannot understand the method. Thus, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) approach is employed to interpret the developed machine learning models.

The proposed framework can be applied to a variety of engineering problems including seismic damage assessment of structures. The performance of the proposed framework is investigated using two case studies of failure identification in reinforcement concrete (RC) columns and shear walls. In addition, the reproducibility, reliability and generalizability of the results were validated and the results of the framework were compared to the benchmark studies. The results of the proposed framework outperformed the benchmark results with high statistical significance.

Although, the current study reveals that the geometric input features and reinforcement indices are the most important variables in failure modes detection, better model can be achieved with employing more robust strategies to establish proper database to decrease the errors in some of the failure modes identification.

This study is a systematic literature review of the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in safety-critical systems. The authors aim to present the current application status according to different AI techniques and propose some research directions and insights to promote its wider application.

A total of 92 articles were selected for this review through a systematic literature review along with a thematic analysis.

The literature is divided into three themes: interpretable method, explain model behavior and reinforcement of safe learning. Among AI techniques, the most widely used are Bayesian networks (BNs) and deep neural networks. In addition, given the huge potential in this field, four future research directions were also proposed.

This study is of vital interest to industry practitioners and regulators in safety-critical domain, as it provided a clear picture of the current status and pointed out that some AI techniques have great application potential. For those that are inherently appropriate for use in safety-critical systems, regulators can conduct in-depth studies to validate and encourage their use in the industry.

This is the first review of the application of AI in safety-critical systems in the literature. It marks the first step toward advancing AI in safety-critical domain. The paper has potential values to promote the use of the term “safety-critical” and to improve the phenomenon of literature fragmentation.

This study aims to examine foreign direct investment (FDI) factors and develops a rational framework for FDI inflow in Western European countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria.

Data for this study were collected from the World development indicators (WDI) database from 1995 to 2018. Factors such as economic growth, pollution, trade, domestic capital investment, gross value-added and the financial stability of the country that influence FDI decisions were selected through empirical literature. A framework was developed using interpretable machine learning (IML), decision trees and three-stage least squares simultaneous equation methods for FDI inflow in Western Europe.

The findings of this study show that there is a difference between the most important and trusted factors for FDI inflow. Additionally, this study shows that machine learning (ML) models can perform better than conventional linear regression models.

This research has several limitations. Ideally, classification accuracies should be higher, and the current scope of this research is limited to examining the performance of FDI determinants within Western Europe.

Through this framework, the national government can understand how investors make their capital allocation decisions in their country. The framework developed in this study can help policymakers better understand the rationality of FDI inflows.

An IML framework has not been developed in prior studies to analyze FDI inflows. Additionally, the author demonstrates the applicability of the IML framework for estimating FDI inflows in Western Europe.

This paper aims to find determinants that can predict the helpfulness of online customer reviews (OCRs) with a novel approach.

The approach consists of feature engineering using various text mining techniques including BERT and machine learning models that can classify OCRs according to their potential helpfulness. Moreover, explainable artificial intelligence methodologies are used to identify the determinants for helpfulness.

The important result is that the boosting-based ensemble model showed the highest prediction performance. In addition, it was confirmed that the sentiment features of OCRs and the reputation of reviewers are important determinants that augment the review helpfulness.

Each online community has different purposes, fields and characteristics. Thus, the results of this study cannot be generalized. However, it is expected that this novel approach can be integrated with any platform where online reviews are used.

This paper incorporates feature engineering methodologies for online reviews, including the latest methodology. It also includes novel techniques to contribute to ongoing research on mining the determinants of review helpfulness.

Tags help promote customer engagement on video-sharing platforms. Video tag recommender systems are artificial intelligence-enabled frameworks that strive for recommending precise tags for videos. Extant video tag recommender systems are uninterpretable, which leads to distrust of the recommendation outcome, hesitation in tag adoption and difficulty in the system debugging process. This study aims at constructing an interpretable and novel video tag recommender system to assist video-sharing platform users in tagging their newly uploaded videos.

The proposed interpretable video tag recommender system is a multimedia deep learning framework composed of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which receives texts and images as inputs. The interpretability of the proposed system is realized through layer-wise relevance propagation.

The case study and user study demonstrate that the proposed interpretable multimedia CNN model could effectively explain its recommended tag to users by highlighting keywords and key patches that contribute the most to the recommended tag. Moreover, the proposed model achieves an improved recommendation performance by outperforming state-of-the-art models.

The interpretability of the proposed recommender system makes its decision process more transparent, builds users’ trust in the recommender systems and prompts users to adopt the recommended tags. Through labeling videos with human-understandable and accurate tags, the exposure of videos to their target audiences would increase, which enhances information technology (IT) adoption, customer engagement, value co-creation and precision marketing on the video-sharing platform.

The proposed model is not only the first explainable video tag recommender system but also the first explainable multimedia tag recommender system to the best of our knowledge.

The purpose is twofold. First, this study aims to establish that black box tree-based machine learning (ML) models have better predictive performance than a standard linear regression (LR) hedonic model for rent prediction. Second, it shows the added value of analyzing tree-based ML models with interpretable machine learning (IML) techniques.

Data on Belgian residential rental properties were collected. Tree-based ML models, random forest regression and eXtreme gradient boosting regression were applied to derive rent prediction models to compare predictive performance with a LR model. Interpretations of the tree-based models regarding important factors in predicting rent were made using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) feature importance (FI) plots and SHAP summary plots.

Results indicate that tree-based models perform better than a LR model for Belgian residential rent prediction. The SHAP FI plots agree that asking price, cadastral income, surface livable, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and variables measuring the proximity to points of interest are dominant predictors. The direction of relationships between rent and its factors is determined with SHAP summary plots. In addition to linear relationships, it emerges that nonlinear relationships exist.

Rent prediction using ML is relatively less studied than house price prediction. In addition, studying prediction models using IML techniques is relatively new in real estate economics. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to derive insights of driving determinants of predicted rents from SHAP FI and SHAP summary plots.

This study aims to explain the state-of-the-art machine learning models that are used in the intrusion detection problem for human-being understandable and study the relationship between the explainability and the performance of the models.

The authors study a recent intrusion data set collected from real-world scenarios and use state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to detect the intrusion. The authors apply several novel techniques to explain the models, then evaluate manually the explanation. The authors then compare the performance of model post- and prior-explainability-based feature selection.

The authors confirm our hypothesis above and claim that by forcing the explainability, the model becomes more robust, requires less computational power but achieves a better predictive performance.

The authors draw our conclusions based on their own research and experimental works.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of stainless steel (SS) in reinforced concrete (RC) structures due to its distinctive corrosion resistance and excellent mechanical properties. To ensure effective synergy between SS and concrete, it is necessary to develop a time-saving approach to accurately determine the ultimate bond strength τ_u between the two materials in RC structures.

Three robust machine learning (ML) models, including support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), are employed to predict τ_u between ribbed SS and concrete. Model hyperparameters are fine-tuned using Bayesian optimization (BO) with 10-fold cross-validation. The interpretable techniques including partial dependence plots (PDPs) and Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) are also utilized to figure out the relationship between input features and output for the best model.

Among the three ML models, BO-XGBoost exhibits the strongest generalization and highest accuracy in estimating τ_u. According to SHAP value-based feature importance, compressive strength of concrete f_c emerges as the most prominent feature, followed by concrete cover thickness c, while the embedment length to diameter ratio l/d, and the diameter d for SS are deemed less important features. Properly increasing c and f_c can enhance τ_u between ribbed SS and concrete.

An online graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed based on BO-XGBoost to estimate τ_u. This tool can be utilized in structural design of RC structures with ribbed SS as reinforcement.

Unsafe behavior accounts for a major part of high accident rates in construction projects. The awareness of unsafe circumstances can help modify unsafe behaviors. To improve awareness in project teams, the present study proposes a framework for predicting safety performance before the implementation of projects.

The machine learning approach was adopted in this work. The proposed framework consists of two major phases: (1) data collection and (2) model development. The first phase involved several steps, including the identification of safety performance criteria, using a questionnaire to collect data, and converting the data into useful information. The second phase, on the other hand, included the use of the decision tree algorithm coupled with the k-Nearest Neighbors algorithm as the predictive tool along with the proposing modification strategies.

A total of nine safety performance criteria were identified. The results showed that safety employees, training, rule adherence and management commitment were key criteria for safety performance prediction. It was also found that the decision tree algorithm is capable of predicting safety performance.

The main novelty of the present study is developing an integrated model to propose strategies for the safety enhancement of projects in the case of incorrect predictions.