The problem of predicting students’ performance has been recently tackled by using matrix factorization, a popular method applied for collaborative filtering based recommender systems. This problem consists of predicting the unknown performance or score of a particular student for a task s/he did not complete or did not attend, according to the scores of the tasks s/he did complete and the scores of the colleagues who completed the task in question. The solving method considers matrix factorization and a gradient descent algorithm in order to build a prediction model that minimizes the error in the prediction of test data. However, we identified two key aspects that influence the accuracy of the prediction. On the one hand, the model involves a pair of important parameters: the learning rate and the regularization factor, for which there are no fixed values for any experimental case. On the other hand, the datasets are extracted from virtual classrooms on online campuses and have a number of implicit latent factors. The right figures are difficult to ascertain, as they depend on the nature of the dataset: subject, size, type of learning, academic environment, etc. This paper proposes some approaches to improve the prediction accuracy by optimizing the values of the latent factors, learning rate, and regularization factor. To this end, we apply optimization algorithms that cover a wide search space. The experimental results obtained from real-world datasets improved the prediction accuracy in the context of a thorough search for predefined values. Obtaining optimized values of these parameters allows us to apply them to further predictions for similar datasets.
Nowadays, highly portable and low-energy computing environments require programming applications able to satisfy computing time and energy constraints. Furthermore, collaborative filtering based recommender systems are intelligent systems that use large databases and perform extensive matrix arithmetic calculations. In this research, we present an optimized algorithm and a parallel hardware implementation as good approach for running embedded collaborative filtering applications. To this end, we have considered high-level synthesis programming for reconfigurable hardware technology. The design was tested under environments where usual parameters and real-world datasets were applied, and compared to usual microprocessors running similar implementations. The performance results obtained by the different implementations were analyzed in computing time and energy consumption terms. The main conclusion is that the optimized algorithm is competitive in embedded applications when considering large datasets and parallel implementations based on reconfigurable hardware.
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