Prediction of students' awareness level towards ICT and mobile technology in Indian and Hungarian University for the real-time: preliminary results

Heliyon. 2019 Jun 18;5(6):e01806. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01806. eCollection 2019 Jun.

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to predict the student's awareness of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Mobile Technology (MT) in Indian and Hungarian university's students. A primary dataset was gathered from two popular universities located in India and Hungary in the academic year 2017-2018. This paper focuses on the prediction of two major parameters from dataset such as usability and educational benefits using four machine learning classifiers multilayer perceptron (ANN), Support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Discriminant (DISC). The multi-classification problem was solved with test, train and validated datasets using machine learning classifiers. One hand, feature aggregation with the train-test-validation technique improved the ANN's prediction accuracy of educational benefits for both countries. Another hand, ANN's accuracy decreases significantly in the prediction of usability. Further, SVM and ANN outperformed the KNN and the DISC in the prediction of awareness level towards ICT and MT in India and Hungary. Also, this paper reveals that the future awareness level for the educational benefits will be Very High or Moderate in both countries. Also, the awareness level is predicted as High and Moderate for usability parameter in both countries. Further, ANN and SVM accuracy and prediction time is compared with T-test at 0.05 significance level which distinguished CPU training time is taken by ANN and SVM using K-fold and Hold out method. Also, K-fold enhanced the significant prediction accuracy of SVM and ANN. the authors also used a STAC web platform to compare the accuracy datasets using T-test and ANOVA test at 0.05 significant level and we found ANN and SVM classifier has no significant difference in prediction accuracy in each dataset. Also, the authors recommend presented predictive models to be deployed as a real-time module of the institute's website for the real-time prediction of ICT & MT awareness level.

Keywords: Computer science; Education.