Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
[No abstract available]

Abstract
Technological evolution has allowed that tasks, usually performed by humans, can now be performed accurately by automated systems, often with superior performance. The healthcare area has been paradigmatic in the automation of processes, as the need to optimize costs, ensuring the provision of quality care, is crucial for the success of organizations. Diabetes, whose prevalence has increased significantly in the last decade, could be a case of application of several technologies that facilitate diagnosis, tracking and monitoring. Such tasks demand a great effort from health systems, requiring the allocation of material, human and financial resources, under penalty of worsening symptoms and emergence of serious complications. In this chapter the authors will present and explore how different technologies can be integrated to provide better healthcare, ensuring quality and safety standards, with reference to the case of diabetes.

Abstract

Abstract
In Portugal, the dropout rate of university courses is around 29%. Understanding the reasons behind such a high desertion rate can drastically improve the success of students and universities. This work applies existing data mining techniques to predict the academic dropout mainly using the academic grades. Four different machine learning techniques are presented and analyzed. The dataset consists of 331 students who were previously enrolled in the Computer Engineering degree at the Universidade de Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD). The study aims to detect students who may prematurely drop out using existing methods. The most relevant data features were identified using the Permutation Feature Importance technique. In the second phase, several methods to predict the dropouts were applied. Then, each machine learning technique's results were displayed and compared to select the best approach to predict academic dropout. The methods used achieved good results, reaching an Fl-Score of 81% in the final test set, concluding that students' marks somehow incorporate their living conditions.