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Machine Learning algorithms fed with data sets which include information such as attendance data, test scores and other student information can provide tutors with powerful tools for decision‐making. Until now, much of the research has been limited to the relation between single variables and student performance. Combining multiple variables as possible predictors of dropout has generally been overlooked. The aim of this work is to present a high level architecture and a case study for a prototype machine learning tool which can automatically recognize dropout‐prone students in university level distance learning classes. Tracking student progress is a time‐consuming job which can be handled automatically by such a tool. While the tutors will still have an essential role in monitoring and evaluating student progress, the tool can compile the data required for reasonable and efficient monitoring. What is more, the application of the tool is not restricted to predicting drop‐out prone students: it can be also used for the prediction of students’ marks, for the prediction of how many students will submit a written assignment, etc. It can also help tutors explore data and build models for prediction, forecasting and classification. Finally, the underlying architecture is independent of the data set and as such it can be used to develop other similar tools

Phishing is one of the major threats affecting businesses worldwide in current times. Organizations and customers face the hazards arising out of phishing attacks because of anonymous access to vulnerable details. Such attacks often result in substantial financial losses. Thus, there is a need for effective intrusion detection techniques to identify and possibly nullify the effects of phishing. Classifying phishing and non-phishing web content is a critical task in information security protocols, and full-proof mechanisms have yet to be implemented in practice. The purpose of the current study is to present an ensemble machine learning model for classifying phishing websites.

A publicly available data set comprising 10,068 instances of phishing and legitimate websites was used to build the classifier model. Feature extraction was performed by deploying a group of methods, and relevant features extracted were used for building the model. A twofold ensemble learner was developed by integrating results from random forest (RF) classifier, fed into a feedforward neural network (NN). Performance of the ensemble classifier was validated using k-fold cross-validation. The twofold ensemble learner was implemented as a user-friendly, interactive decision support system for classifying websites as phishing or legitimate ones.

Experimental simulations were performed to access and compare the performance of the ensemble classifiers. The statistical tests estimated that RF_NN model gave superior performance with an accuracy of 93.41 per cent and minimal mean squared error of 0.000026.

The research data set used in this study is publically available and easy to analyze. Comparative analysis with other real-time data sets of recent origin must be performed to ensure generalization of the model against various security breaches. Different variants of phishing threats must be detected rather than focusing particularly toward phishing website detection.

The twofold ensemble model is not applied for classification of phishing websites in any previous studies as per the knowledge of authors.

In a virtual interconnected digital space, the metaverse encompasses various virtual environments where people can interact, including engaging in business activities. Machine learning (ML) is a strategic technology that enables digital transformation to the metaverse, and it is becoming a more prevalent driver of business performance and reporting on performance. However, ML has limitations, and using the technology in business processes, such as accounting, poses a technology governance failure risk. To address this risk, decision makers and those tasked to govern these technologies must understand where the technology fits into the business process and consider its limitations to enable a governed transition to the metaverse. Using selected accounting processes, this study aims to describe the limitations that ML techniques pose to ensure the quality of financial information.

A grounded theory literature review method, consisting of five iterative stages, was used to identify the accounting tasks that ML could perform in the respective accounting processes, describe the ML techniques that could be applied to each accounting task and identify the limitations associated with the individual techniques.

This study finds that limitations such as data availability and training time may impact the quality of the financial information and that ML techniques and their limitations must be clearly understood when developing and implementing technology governance measures.

The study contributes to the growing literature on enterprise information and technology management and governance. In this study, the authors integrated current ML knowledge into an accounting context. As accounting is a pervasive aspect of business, the insights from this study will benefit decision makers and those tasked to govern these technologies to understand how some processes are more likely to be affected by certain limitations and how this may impact the accounting objectives. It will also benefit those users hoping to exploit the advantages of ML in their accounting processes while understanding the specific technology limitations on an accounting task level.

The sharing economy is a socio-economic system in which individuals acquire and distribute goods and services among each other for free or for compensation through internet platforms. The sharing economy has attracted the interest of the academic community, which examined the phenomenon from the economic, social and technological perspectives. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Given the lack of an overarching analysis of the sharing economy, this paper employs a quantitative content analysis approach to explore and synthesise relevant findings to facilitate the understanding of this emerging phenomenon.

The paper identified and grouped findings under four themes, namely: collaborative consumption practices, resources, drivers of user engagement and impacts, each of which is discussed in relation to the three main themes, aiming to compare findings and then put forward an agenda for further research.

The paper offers a balanced analysis of the building blocks of the sharing economy, to identify emerging themes within each stream, to discuss any contextual differences from a multi-stakeholder perspective and to propose directions for future studies.

This paper aims to present a hybrid machine learning algorithm for additive manufacturing (AM) design feature recommendation during the conceptual design phase.

In the proposed hybrid machine learning algorithm, hierarchical clustering is performed on coded AM design features and target components, resulting in a dendrogram. Existing industrial application examples are used to train a supervised classifier that determines the final sub-cluster within the dendrogram containing the recommended AM design features.

Through a case study of designing additive manufactured R/C car components, the proposed hybrid machine learning method was proven useful in providing feasible conceptual design solutions for inexperienced designers by recommending appropriate AM design features.

The proposed method helps inexperienced designers who are newly exposed to AM capabilities explore and utilize AM design knowledge computationally.

This paper seeks to describe XML technologies and to show how they can be applied for developing web‐based courses and supporting authors who do not have much experience with the preparation of web‐based courses.

When developing online courses the academic staff has to address the following problem – how to keep pace with the ever‐changing technology. Using XML technologies helps to develop a learning environment which can be useful for academics when designing web‐based courses, preparing the materials and then reusing them.

The paper discusses the benefits of using XML for developing computer‐based courses. The task of introducing new versions of existing courses can be reduced to editing appropriate XML files without any need for program change and an author can perform this task easily from a computer connected to the internet. What is more – using XML makes it possible to reuse data in different teaching situations.

The environment has only been used for two years and further research is needed on how user‐friendly the system really is and how it can still be improved.

The paper describes the environment which can be used to develop and reuse online materials, courses, metadata etc.

The paper offers practical help to academics interested in web‐based teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to offer two Web-based platforms for systematic analysis of seismic processes. Both platforms are designed to analyze and forecast the state of the environment and, in particular, the level of seismic hazard. The first platform analyzes the fields representing the properties of the seismic process; the second platform forecasts strong earthquakes. Earthquake forecasting is based on a new one-class classification method.

The paper suggests an approach to systematic forecasting of earthquakes and examines the results of tests. This approach is based on a new method of machine learning, called the method of the minimum area of alarm. The method allows to construct a forecast rule that optimizes the probability of detecting target earthquakes in a learning sample set, provided that the area of the alarm zone does not exceed a predetermined one.

The paper presents two platforms alongside the method of analysis. It was shown that these platforms can be used for systematic analysis of seismic process. By testing of the earthquake forecasting method in several regions, it was shown that the method of the minimum area of alarm has satisfactory forecast quality.

The described technology has two advantages: simplicity of configuration for a new problem area and a combination of interactive easy analysis supported by intuitive operations and a simplified user interface with a detailed, comprehensive analysis of spatio-temporal processes intended for specialists. The method of the minimum area of alarm solves the problem of one-class classification. The method is original. It uses in training the precedents of anomalous objects and statistically takes into account normal objects.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and assess the structural characteristics (conceptual utility) of the most popular classification and predictive techniques employed in customer relationship management and customer scoring and to evaluate their classification and predictive precision.

A sample of customers' credit rating and socio‐demographic profiles are employed to evaluate the analytic and classification properties of discriminant analysis, binary logistic regression, artificial neural networks, C5 algorithm, and regression trees employing Chi‐squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID).

With regards to interpretability and the conceptual utility of the parameters generated by the five techniques, logistic regression provides easily interpretable parameters through its logit. The logits can be interpreted in the same way as regression slopes. In addition, the logits can be converted to odds providing a common sense evaluation of the relative importance of each independent variable. Finally, the technique provides robust statistical tests to evaluate the model parameters. Finally, both CHAID and the C5 algorithm provide visual tools (regression tree) and semantic rules (rule set for classification) to facilitate the interpretation of the model parameters. These can be highly desirable properties when the researcher attempts to explain the conceptual and operational foundations of the model.

Most treatments of complex classification procedures have been undertaken idiosyncratically, that is, evaluating only one technique. This paper evaluates and compares the conceptual utility and predictive precision of five different classification techniques on a moderate sample size and provides clear guidelines in technique selection when undertaking customer scoring and classification.

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the most common type of gynecologic cancer in the world with a high rate of mortality. Due to manifestation of generic symptoms and absence of specific biomarkers, OC is usually diagnosed at a late stage. Machine learning models can be employed to predict driver genes implicated in causative mutations.

In the present study, a comprehensive next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis of whole exome sequences of 47 OC patients was carried out to identify clinically significant mutations. Nine functional features of 708 mutations identified were input into a machine learning classification model by employing the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier method for prediction of OC driver genes.

The XGBoost classifier model yielded a classification accuracy of 0.946, which was superior to that obtained by other classifiers such as decision tree, Naive Bayes, random forest and support vector machine. Further, an interaction network was generated to identify and establish correlations with cancer-associated pathways and gene ontology data.

The final results revealed 12 putative candidate cancer driver genes, namely LAMA3, LAMC3, COL6A1, COL5A1, COL2A1, UGT1A1, BDNF, ANK1, WNT10A, FZD4, PLEKHG5 and CYP2C9, that may have implications in clinical diagnosis.

The trend of “Deep Learning for Internet of Things (IoT)” has gained fresh momentum with enormous upcoming applications employing these models as their processing engine and Cloud as their resource giant. But this picture leads to underutilization of ever-increasing device pool of IoT that has already passed 15 billion mark in 2015. Thus, it is high time to explore a different approach to tackle this issue, keeping in view the characteristics and needs of the two fields. Processing at the Edge can boost applications with real-time deadlines while complementing security.

This review paper contributes towards three cardinal directions of research in the field of DL for IoT. The first section covers the categories of IoT devices and how Fog can aid in overcoming the underutilization of millions of devices, forming the realm of the things for IoT. The second direction handles the issue of immense computational requirements of DL models by uncovering specific compression techniques. An appropriate combination of these techniques, including regularization, quantization, and pruning, can aid in building an effective compression pipeline for establishing DL models for IoT use-cases. The third direction incorporates both these views and introduces a novel approach of parallelization for setting up a distributed systems view of DL for IoT.

DL models are growing deeper with every passing year. Well-coordinated distributed execution of such models using Fog displays a promising future for the IoT application realm. It is realized that a vertically partitioned compressed deep model can handle the trade-off between size, accuracy, communication overhead, bandwidth utilization, and latency but at the expense of an additionally considerable memory footprint. To reduce the memory budget, we propose to exploit Hashed Nets as potentially favorable candidates for distributed frameworks. However, the critical point between accuracy and size for such models needs further investigation.

To the best of our knowledge, no study has explored the inherent parallelism in deep neural network architectures for their efficient distribution over the Edge-Fog continuum. Besides covering techniques and frameworks that have tried to bring inference to the Edge, the review uncovers significant issues and possible future directions for endorsing deep models as processing engines for real-time IoT. The study is directed to both researchers and industrialists to take on various applications to the Edge for better user experience.