TY - JOUR
T1 - On data protection regulations, big data and sledgehammers in Higher Education
AU - García-Vélez, Roberto Agustín
AU - López-Nores, Martín
AU - González-Fernández, Gabriel
AU - Robles-Bykbaev, Vladimir Espartaco
AU - Wallace, Manolis
AU - Pazos-Arias, José J.
AU - Gil-Solla, Alberto
PY - 2019/7/31
Y1 - 2019/7/31
N2 - Universities in Latin America commonly gather much more information about their students than allowed by data protection regulations in other parts of the world. We have tackled the question of whether abundant socio-economic data can be harnessed for the purpose of predicting academic outcomes and, thereby, taking proactive actions in student attention, course planning and resource management. A study was conducted to analyze the data gathered by a private university in Ecuador over more than 20 years, to normalize them and to parameterize a Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network, whose best-performing configuration would be used as a benchmark for the comparison of more recent and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence techniques. However, an extensive scan of hyperparameters for the perceptron-exploring more than 12,000 configurations-revealed no significant relationships between the input variables and the chosen metrics, suggesting that there is no gain from processing the extensive socio-economic data. This finding contradicts the expectations raised by previous works in the related literature and in some cases highlights important methodological flaws.
AB - Universities in Latin America commonly gather much more information about their students than allowed by data protection regulations in other parts of the world. We have tackled the question of whether abundant socio-economic data can be harnessed for the purpose of predicting academic outcomes and, thereby, taking proactive actions in student attention, course planning and resource management. A study was conducted to analyze the data gathered by a private university in Ecuador over more than 20 years, to normalize them and to parameterize a Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network, whose best-performing configuration would be used as a benchmark for the comparison of more recent and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence techniques. However, an extensive scan of hyperparameters for the perceptron-exploring more than 12,000 configurations-revealed no significant relationships between the input variables and the chosen metrics, suggesting that there is no gain from processing the extensive socio-economic data. This finding contradicts the expectations raised by previous works in the related literature and in some cases highlights important methodological flaws.
KW - Data protection
KW - Deep learning
KW - Multi-Layer Perceptron
KW - Performance prediction
KW - Student records
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85070723081&origin=inward
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85070723081&origin=inward
UR - http://www.mendeley.com/research/data-protection-regulations-big-data-sledgehammers-higher-education
U2 - 10.3390/app9153084
DO - 10.3390/app9153084
M3 - Article
SN - 2076-3417
VL - 9
SP - 3084
JO - Applied Sciences (Switzerland)
JF - Applied Sciences (Switzerland)
IS - 15
M1 - 3084
ER -