Major Class Recommendation System based on Deep learning using Network Analysis

네트워크 분석을 활용한 딥러닝 기반 전공과목 추천 시스템

In university education, the choice of major class plays an important role in students' careers. However, in line with the changes in the industry, the fields of major subjects by department are diversifying and increasing in number in university education. As a result, students have difficulty to choose and take classes according to their career paths. In general, students choose classes based on experiences such as choices of peers or advice from seniors. This has the advantage of being able to take into account the general situation, but it does not reflect individual tendencies and considerations of existing courses, and has a problem that leads to information inequality that is shared only among specific students. In addition, as non-face-to-face classes have recently been conducted and exchanges between students have decreased, even experience-based decisions have not been made as well. Therefore, this study proposes a recommendation system model that can recommend college major classes suitable for individual characteristics based on data rather than experience. The recommendation system recommends information and content (music, movies, books, images, etc.) that a specific user may be interested in. It is already widely used in services where it is important to consider individual tendencies such as YouTube and Facebook, and you can experience it familiarly in providing personalized services in content services such as over-the-top media services (OTT). Classes are also a kind of content consumption in terms of selecting classes suitable for individuals from a set content list. However, unlike other content consumption, it is characterized by a large influence of selection results. For example, in the case of music and movies, it is usually consumed once and the time required to consume content is short. Therefore, the importance of each item is relatively low, and there is no deep concern in selecting. Major classes usually have a long consumption time because they have to be taken for one semester, and each item has a high importance and requires greater caution in choice because it affects many things such as career and graduation requirements depending on the composition of the selected classes. Depending on the unique characteristics of these major classes, the recommendation system in the education field supports decision-making that reflects individual characteristics that are meaningful and cannot be reflected in experience-based decision-making, even though it has a relatively small number of item ranges. This study aims to realize personalized education and enhance students' educational satisfaction by presenting a recommendation model for university major class. In the model study, class history data of undergraduate students at University from 2015 to 2017 were used, and students and their major names were used as metadata. The class history data is implicit feedback data that only indicates whether content is consumed, not reflecting preferences for classes. Therefore, when we derive embedding vectors that characterize students and classes, their expressive power is low. With these issues in mind, this study proposes a Net-NeuMF model that generates vectors of students, classes through network analysis and utilizes them as input values of the model. The model was based on the structure of NeuMF using one-hot vectors, a representative model using data with implicit feedback. The input vectors of the model are generated to represent the characteristic of students and classes through network analysis. To generate a vector representing a student, each student is set to a node and the edge is designed to connect with a weight if the two students take the same class. Similarly, to generate a vector representing the class, each class was set as a node, and the edge connected if any students had taken the classes in common. Thus, we utilize Node2Vec, a representation learning methodology that quantifies the characteristics of each node. For the evaluation of the model, we used four indicators that are mainly utilized by recommendation systems, and experiments were conducted on three different dimensions to analyze the impact of embedding dimensions on the model. The results show better performance on evaluation metrics regardless of dimension than when using one-hot vectors in existing NeuMF structures. Thus, this work contributes to a network of students (users) and classes (items) to increase expressiveness over existing one-hot embeddings, to match the characteristics of each structure that constitutes the model, and to show better performance on various kinds of evaluation metrics compared to existing methodologies.

대학 교육에 있어서 전공과목의 선택은 학생들의 진로에 중요한 역할을 한다. 하지만, 산업의 변화에 발맞춰 대학 교육도 학과별 전공과목의 분야가 다양해지고 그 수가 많아지고 있다. 이에 학생들은 본인의 진로에 맞게 수업을 선택하여 수강하는 것에 어려움을 겪고 있다. 본 연구는 대학 전공과목 추천 모델을 제시함으로써 개인 맞춤형 교육을 실현하고 학생들의 교육만족도를 제고하고자 한다. 모델 연구에는 대학교 학부생들의 2015년~2017년 수강 이력 데이터를 활용하였으며, 메타데이터로는 학생과 수업의 전공 명을 사용했다. 수강 이력 데이터는 컨텐츠 소비 여부만을 나타낸 암시적 피드백 데이터로, 수업에 대한 선호도를 반영한 것이 아니다. 따라서 학생과 수업의 특성을 나타내는 임베딩 벡터를 도출했을 시, 표현력이 낮다. 본 연구는 이러한 문제점에 착안하여, 네트워크 분석을 통해 학생, 수업의 벡터를 생성하고 이를 모델의 입력 값으로 활용하는 Net-NeuMF 모델을 제시한다. 모델은 암시적 피드백을 가진 데이터를 이용한 대표적인 모델인 원핫 벡터를 이용하는 NeuMF의 구조를 기반으로 하였다. 모델의 입력 벡터는 네트워크 분석을 통해 학생과 수업의 특성을 나타낼 수 있도록 생성하였다. 학생을 표현하는 벡터를 생성하기 위해, 각 학생을 노드로 설정하고 엣지는 두 학생이 같은 수업을 수강한 경우 가중치를 가지고 연결되도록 설계했다. 마찬가지로 수업을 표현하는 벡터를 생성하기 위해 각 수업을 노드로 설정하고 엣지는 공통으로 수강한 학생이 있는 경우 연결시켰다. 이에 각 노드의 특성을 수치화 하는 표현 학습방법론인 Node2Vec을 이용하였다. 모델의 평가를 위해 추천 시스템에서 주로 활용하는 지표 4가지를 사용하였고, 임베딩 차원이 모델에 미치는 영향을 분석하기 위해 3가지 다른 차원에 대한 실험을 진행하였다. 그 결과 기존 NeuMF 구조에서 원-핫 벡터를 이용하였을 때보다 차원과 관계없이 평가지표에서 좋은 성능을 보였다. 이에 본 연구는 학생(사용자)와 수업(아이템)의 네트워크를 이용해 기존 원-핫 임베딩 보다 표현력을 높였다는 점, 모델을 구성하는 각 구조의 특성에 맞도록 임베딩 벡터를 활용하였다는 점, 그리고 기존의 방법론에 비해 다양한 종류의 평가지표에서 좋은 성능을 보였다는 점을 기여점으로 가지고 있다.