Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Personalized learning occurs when e-learning systems make deliberate efforts to design educational experiences that fit the needs, goals, talents, and interests of their learners. Researchers had recently begun to investigate various techniques to help teachers improve e-learning systems. In this paper, we describe a recommendation module of a programming tutoring system - Protus, which can automatically adapt to the interests and knowledge levels of learners. This system recognizes different patterns of learning style and learners' habits through testing the learning styles of learners and mining their server logs. Firstly, it processes the clusters based on different learning styles. Next, it analyzes the habits and the interests of the learners through mining the frequent sequences by the AprioriAll algorithm. Finally, this system completes personalized recommendation of the learning content according to the ratings of these frequent sequences, provided by the Protus system. Some experiments were carried out with two real groups of learners: the experimental and the control group. Learners of the control group learned in a normal way and did not receive any recommendation or guidance through the course, while the students of the experimental group were required to use the Protus system. The results show suitability of using this recommendation model, in order to suggest online learning activities to learners based on their learning style, knowledge and preferences.

E-Learning personalization based on hybrid recommendation strategy and learning style identification

Integrating learning styles and adaptive e-learning system

Learning styles are increasingly being incorporated into technology-enhanced learning. Appropriately, a great deal of recent research work is occurring in this area. As more information and details about learning styles becomes available, learning styles can be better accommodated and integrated into all aspects of educational technology. The aim of this paper is to analyse data about learning styles with respect to the Felder-Silverman learning style model (FSLSM) in order to provide a more detailed description of learning style dimensions. The analyses show the most representative characteristics of each learning style dimension as well as how representative these characteristics are. As a result, we provide additional information about the learning style dimensions of FSLSM. This information is especially important when learning styles are incorporated in technology-enhanced learning.

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In-Depth Analysis of the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Dimensions

Each learner has different preferences and needs. Therefore, it is very crucial to provide the different styles of learners with different learning environments that are more preferred and more efficient to them. This paper reports a study of the intelligent learning environment where the learner's preferences are diagnosed, and then user interfaces are customized in an adaptive manner to accommodate the preferences. A learning system with a specific interface has been devised based on the learning-style model by Felder & Silverman, so that different learner preferences are revealed through user interactions with the system. Using this interface, learning styles are diagnosed from learner behavior patterns on the interface using Decision Tree and Hidden Markov Model approaches.

Learning styles diagnosis based on user interface behaviors for the customization of learning interfaces in an intelligent tutoring system

A learning diagnosis system collects data from a learner's learning process, and analyzes it to build a suitable model for the learner, which can then be incorporated into an intelligent tutoring system to provide customized tutoring services. However, if the collected data reflects inconsistent learner behaviors or unpredictable learning tendencies, then the reliability of the learner model is degraded. In this paper, the outliers in the learner's data are eliminated by a k-NN method. We apply this method to an experimental data set obtained using DOLLS-HI, a learner diagnosis system that uses housing interior learning contents to diagnose learning styles. The resulting diagnosis model shows improved reliability than before eliminating the outliers.

A Outliers Analysis of Learner's Data based on User Interface Behaviors

Improvement of Learning Styles Diagnosis Based on Outliers Reduction of User Interface Behaviors

Motivation is a paramount factor to student success. Although it is well known that the learner’s motivation and emotional state in educational contexts are very important, they have not been fully addressed in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). In this paper, a method for integrated motivation diagnosis and motivational planning is described in a manner applied to an operable system. For the motivational diagnosis rules, three different channels of data (performance from interaction with the system, verbal communication, and feedbacks) are combined. For the motivational planning rules, four different strategies (different learning process, helps, different teaching strategies, and arousal questions or feedbacks) are combined. By applying the mechanisms, a tutoring system for the topic of perspective projection with motivation diagnosis and motivational planning on a multiagent system with fuzzy logic has been implemented.Copyright © 2007 by ASME

Tae Bok Yoon

Papers

Learning styles diagnosis based on user interface behaviors for the customization of learning interfaces in an intelligent tutoring system

A Outliers Analysis of Learner's Data based on User Interface Behaviors

Improvement of Learning Styles Diagnosis Based on Outliers Reduction of User Interface Behaviors

A Perspective Projection Tutoring System With Motivation Diagnosis and Planning