Title: Prediction and classification of churners in online learning using ensemble of distributed iterative classifiers

Authors: V. Senthil Kumaran

Addresses: Department of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, 641-004, India

Abstract: In e-learning domain, the weak learners known as churn are the one who underperform and might drop from the course. Identifying and giving more attentions to such churn is an active research problem. Numerous methods have been proposed in the literature, which predicts churn based on their personal attributes and learning curve. One major limitation with the existing method is that they evaluate their system with minimal set of data. To overcome that issue and to improve the accuracy, this research work proposed a distributed iterative classifier that deploys an ensemble learning algorithm to generalise the model for predicting potential churn from personal attributes. Predictions from the base classifier are obtained using a distributed iterative classification algorithm that deploys a map-reduce framework. Iterative classification algorithm predicts signs of attrition in the learners through their online interactions. It can also process a very large network, which was lacking in the existing solution. The proposed system is validated using the features of five students and results are reported. Experimental results show that the proposed ensemble classifier predicts churn competently.

Keywords: churn prediction; distributed iterative classification; dropout in e-learning; ensemble learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLT.2022.129112

International Journal of Learning Technology, 2022 Vol.17 No.4, pp.339 - 359

Accepted: 22 Jun 2022
Published online: 20 Feb 2023 *

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