Scholarships are a reflection of academic achievement for college students. The traditional scholarship assignment is strictly based on final grades and cannot recognize students whose performance trend improves or declines during the semester. This paper develops the Trajectory Mining on Clustering for Scholarship Assignment and Academic Warning (TMS) approach to identify the factors that affect the academic achievement of college students and to provide decision support to help low-performing students attain better performance. Specifically, we first conduct feature engineering to generate a set of features to characterize the lifestyles patterns, learning patterns, and Internet usage patterns of students. We then apply the objective and subjective combined weighted k-means (Wosk-means) algorithm to perform clustering analysis to identify the characteristics of different student groups. Considering the difficulty in obtaining the real global positioning system (GPS) records of students, we apply manually generated spatiotemporal trajectories data to quantify the direction of trajectory deviation with the assistance of the PrefixSpan algorithm to identify low-performing students. The experimental results show that the silhouette coefficient and Calinski-Harabasz index of the Wosk-means algorithm are both approximately 1.5 times to that of the best baseline algorithm, and the sum of the squared error of the Wosk-means algorithm is only the half of the best baseline algorithm.

Transfer learning has attracted a large amount of interest and research in last decades, and some effort has been made to build more precise recommendation systems. Most previous transfer recommendation systems assume that the target domain shares the same/similar rating patterns with the auxiliary source domain, which is used to improve the recommendation performance. However, almost all existing transfer learning work does not consider the characteristics of sequential data. In this paper, we study the new cross-domain recommendation scenario by mining novelty-seeking trait. Recent studies in psychology suggest that novelty-seeking trait is highly related to consumer behavior, which has a profound business impact on online recommendation. Previous work performed on only one single target domain may not fully characterize users’ novelty-seeking trait well due to the data scarcity and sparsity, leading to the poor recommendation performance. Along this line, we propose a new cross-domain novelty-seeking trait mining model (CDNST for short) to improve the sequential recommendation performance by transferring the knowledge from auxiliary source domain. We conduct systematic experiments on three domain datasets crawled from Douban to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Moreover, we analyze the directed influence of the temporal property at the source and target domains in detail.

To protect consumers and those who manufacture and sell the products they enjoy, it is important to develop convenient tools to help consumers distinguish an authentic product from a counterfeit one. The advancement of deep learning techniques for fine-grained object recognition creates new possibilities for genuine product identification. In this paper, we develop a Semi-Supervised Attention (SSA) model to work in conjunction with a large-scale multiple-source dataset named YSneaker, which consists of sneakers from various brands and their authentication results, to identify authentic sneakers. Specifically, the SSA model has a self-attention structure for different images of a labeled sneaker and a novel prototypical loss is designed to exploit unlabeled data within the data structure. The model draws on the weighted average of the output feature representations, where the weights are determined by an additional shallow neural network. This allows the SSA model to focus on the most important images of a sneaker for use in identification. A unique feature of the SSA model is its ability to take advantage of unlabeled data, which can help to further minimize the intra-class variation for more discriminative feature embedding. To validate the model, we collect a large number of labeled and unlabeled sneaker images and perform extensive experimental studies. The results show that YSneaker together with the proposed SSA architecture can identify authentic sneakers with a high accuracy rate.