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Predicting student outcomes is essential in educational analytics for creating personalised learning experiences. The effectiveness of these predictive models relies on having access to sufficient and accurate data. However, privacy concerns and the lack of student consent often restrict data collection, limiting the applicability of predictive models. To tackle this obstacle, we employ Generative Adversarial Networks, a type of Generative AI, to generate tabular data replicating and enlarging the dimensions of two distinct publicly available student datasets. The ‘Math dataset’ has 395 observations and 33 features, whereas the ‘Exam dataset’ has 1000 observations and 8 features. Using advanced Python libraries, Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks and Copula Generative Adversarial Networks, our methodology consists of two phases. First, a mirroring approach where we produce synthetic data matching the volume of the real datasets, focusing on privacy and evaluating predictive accuracy. Second, augmenting the real datasets with newly created synthetic observations to fill gaps in datasets that lack student data. We validate the synthetic data before employing these approaches using Correlation Analysis, Density Analysis, Correlation Heatmaps, and Principal Component Analysis. We then compare the predictive accuracy of whether students will pass or fail their exams across original, synthetic, and augmented datasets. Employing Feedforward Neural Networks, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Gradient-boosted Neural Networks, and using Bayesian optimisation for hyperparameter tuning, this research methodically examines the impact of synthetic data on prediction accuracy. We implement and optimize these models using Python. Our mirroring approach aims to achieve accuracy rates that closely align with the original data. Meanwhile, our augmenting approach seeks to reach a slightly higher accuracy level than when solely learning from the original data. Our findings provide actionable insights into leveraging advanced Generative AI techniques to enhance educational outcomes and meet our objectives successfully.

Predicting student outcomes is an essential task and a central challenge among artificial intelligence-based personalised learning applications. Despite several studies exploring student performance prediction, there is a notable lack of comprehensive and comparative research that methodically evaluates and compares multiple machine learning models alongside deep learning architectures. In response, our research provides a comprehensive comparison to evaluate and improve ten different machine learning and deep learning models, either well-established or cutting-edge techniques, namely, random forest, decision tree, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbours classifier, logistic regression, linear regression, and state-of-the-art extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), as well as a fully connected feed-forward neural network, a convolutional neural network, and a gradient-boosted neural network. We implemented and fine-tuned these models using Python 3.9.5. With a keen emphasis on prediction accuracy and model performance optimisation, we evaluate these methodologies across two benchmark public student datasets. We employ a dual evaluation approach, utilising both k-fold cross-validation and holdout methods, to comprehensively assess the models’ performance. Our research focuses primarily on predicting student outcomes in final examinations by determining their success or failure. Moreover, we explore the importance of feature selection using the ubiquitous Lasso for dimensionality reduction to improve model efficiency, prevent overfitting, and examine its impact on prediction accuracy for each model, both with and without Lasso. This study provides valuable guidance for selecting and deploying predictive models for tabular data classification like student outcome prediction, which seeks to utilise data-driven insights for personalised education.

Abstract Background and Aims The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic had a significant effect on the diagnosis and treatment of head and neck cancers. Therefore, in this study, we decided to discuss the impact of COVID‐19 on the stage and histological characteristics of patients with tongue cancer from March 2020 to March 2021 and compared to the previous 3 years. Methods In this time series study, patients diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the operated tongue cancer were divided into two groups. Patients who operated from March 2020 to March 2021 (n = 36) and patients who operated 3 years ago (n = 70) were included in the study. The results were analyzed using SPSS 21 software. Results The study found that during the pandemic, the stage of tongue cancer in patients who underwent surgery was higher than before the pandemic (p = 0.01). Moreover, the depth of invasion was significantly higher during the COVID‐19 outbreak in the pathology sample of the patients (p = 0.006), while the involvement of lymph nodes and other variables between the groups was not statistically significant. Conclusion COVID‐19 has adverse effects on the diagnosis and treatment of tongue cancer. Also, it leads to advanced stages of the tumor and increases the depth of invasion of the cancer. Hence, it is important to plan correctly and appropriately for the diagnosis and treatment of these patients in conditions such as the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Numerous studies have established a correlation between creativity and intrinsic motivation to learn, with creativity defined as the process of generating original and valuable ideas, often by integrating perspectives from different fields. The field of educational technology has shown a growing interest in leveraging technology to promote creativity in the classroom, with several studies demonstrating the positive impact of creativity on learning outcomes. However, mining creative thinking patterns from educational data remains a challenging task, even with the proliferation of research on adaptive technology for education. This paper presents an initial effort towards formalizing educational knowledge by developing a domain-specific Knowledge Base that identifies key concepts, facts, and assumptions essential for identifying creativity patterns. Our proposed pipeline involves modeling raw educational data, such as assessments and class activities, as a graph to facilitate the contextualization of knowledge. We then leverage a rule-based approach to enable the mining of creative thinking patterns from the contextualized data and knowledge graph. To validate our approach, we evaluate it on real-world datasets and demonstrate how the proposed pipeline can enable instructors to gain insights into students’ creative thinking patterns from their activities and assessment tasks.

This study delves into the realm of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) frameworks, aiming to empower researchers and practitioners with a deeper understanding of these tools. We establish a comprehensive knowledge base by classifying and analyzing prominent XAI solutions based on key attributes like explanation type, model dependence, and use cases. This resource equips users to navigate the diverse XAI landscape and select the most suitable framework for their specific needs. Furthermore, the study proposes a novel framework called XAIE (eXplainable AI Evaluator) for informed decision-making in XAI adoption. This framework empowers users to assess different XAI options based on their application context objectively. This will lead to more responsible AI development by fostering transparency and trust. Finally, the research identifies the limitations and challenges associated with the existing XAI frameworks, paving the way for future advancements. By highlighting these areas, the study guides researchers and developers in enhancing the capabilities of Explainable AI.

This study presents a responsive analysis of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in risk management, contrasting traditional approaches with those augmented by AI and highlighting the challenges and opportunities that emerge. AI, intense learning methodologies such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been identified as pivotal in extracting meaningful insights from image data, a form of analysis that holds significant potential in identifying and managing risks across various industries. The research methodology involves a strategic selection and processing of images for analysis and introduces three case studies that serve as benchmarks for evaluation. These case studies showcase the application of AI, in place of image processing capabilities, to identify hazards, evaluate risks, and suggest control measures. The comparative evaluation focuses on the accuracy, relevance, and practicality of the AI-generated findings alongside the system’s response time and comprehensive understanding of the context. Results reveal that AI can significantly enhance risk assessment processes, offering rapid and detailed insights. However, the study also recognises the intrinsic limitations of AI in contextual interpretation, advocating for a synergy between technological and domain-specific expertise. The conclusion underscores the transformative potential of AI in risk management, supporting continued research to further integrate AI effectively into risk assessment frameworks.

Abstract Background Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Recent studies have observed causative mutations in susceptible genes related to colorectal cancer in 10 to 15% of the patients. This highlights the importance of identifying mutations for early detection of this cancer for more effective treatments among high risk individuals. Mutation is considered as the key point in cancer research. Many studies have performed cancer subtyping based on the type of frequently mutated genes, or the proportion of mutational processes. However, to the best of our knowledge, combination of these features has never been used together for this task. This highlights the potential to introduce better and more inclusive subtype classification approaches using wider range of related features to enable biomarker discovery and thus inform drug development for CRC. Results In this study, we develop a new pipeline based on a novel concept called ‘gene-motif’, which merges mutated gene information with tri-nucleotide motif of mutated sites, for colorectal cancer subtype identification. We apply our pipeline to the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) CRC samples and identify, for the first time, 3131 gene-motif combinations that are significantly mutated in 536 ICGC colorectal cancer samples. Using these features, we identify seven CRC subtypes with distinguishable phenotypes and biomarkers, including unique cancer related signaling pathways, in which for most of them targeted treatment options are currently available. Interestingly, we also identify several genes that are mutated in multiple subtypes but with unique sequence contexts. Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of considering both the mutation type and mutated genes in identification of cancer subtypes and cancer biomarkers. The new CRC subtypes presented in this study demonstrates distinguished phenotypic properties which can be effectively used to develop new treatments. By knowing the genes and phenotypes associated with the subtypes, a personalized treatment plan can be developed that considers the specific phenotypes associated with their genomic lesion.

Abstract Emotion recognition is defined as identifying human emotion and is directly related to different fields such as human–computer interfaces, human emotional processing, irrational analysis, medical diagnostics, data-driven animation, human–robot communication, and many more. This paper proposes a new facial emotional recognition model using a convolutional neural network. Our proposed model, “ConvNet”, detects seven specific emotions from image data including anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, sadness, and surprise. The features extracted by the Local Binary Pattern (LBP), region based Oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) and Convolutional Neural network (CNN) from facial expressions images were fused to develop the classification model through training by our proposed CNN model (ConvNet). Our method can converge quickly and achieves good performance which the authors can develop a real-time schema that can easily fit the model and sense emotions. Furthermore, this study focuses on the mental or emotional stuff of a man or woman using the behavioral aspects. To complete the training of the CNN network model, we use the FER2013 databases at first, and then apply the generalization techniques to the JAFFE and CK+ datasets respectively in the testing stage to evaluate the performance of the model. In the generalization approach on the JAFFE dataset, we get a 92.05% accuracy, while on the CK+ dataset, we acquire a 98.13% accuracy which achieve the best performance among existing methods. We also test the system’s success by identifying facial expressions in real-time. ConvNet consists of four layers of convolution together with two fully connected layers. The experimental results show that the ConvNet is able to achieve 96% training accuracy which is much better than current existing models. However, when compared to other validation methods, the suggested technique was more accurate. ConvNet also achieved validation accuracy of 91.01% for the FER2013 dataset. We also made all the materials publicly accessible for the research community at: https://github.com/Tanoy004/Emotion-recognition-through-CNN .

Copy Number Variation (CNV) refers to a type of structural genomic alteration in which a segment of chromosome is duplicated or deleted. To date, many CNVs have been identified as causative genetic elements for several diseases and phenotypes. However, performing a CNV-based genome-wide association study is challenging due to inconsistency in length and occurrence of CNVs across different individuals under investigation. One of the most efficient strategies to address this issue is building CNV regions (genomic regions in which CNVs are overlapping - CNVRs). However, this approach is susceptible to a high false positive rate due to overlapping and co-occurring of confounding CNVRs with true positive CNVRs. Here, we develop PeakCNV that differentiates false-positive CNVRs from true positives by calculating a new metric, independence ranking score, (IR-score) via a feature ranking approach. We compared the performance of PeakCNV with other current existing tools by carrying out two case studies one using the CNV genotype data for individuals with prostate cancer (194 cases and 2,392 healthy individuals) and the second one for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders (19,642 cases and 6,451 healthy individuals). Crucially, our benchmarking analyses on prostate cancer cohort indicated that PeakCNV identifies a fewer risk candidate CNVRs with shorter lengths compared to other tools. Importantly, these CNVRs cover a greater proportion of case over healthy individuals compared to other tools. The accuracy of PeakCNV in identifying relevant candidate CNVRs was reproducible in the case study on neurodevelopmental disorders. Using data from the FANTOM5 expression atlas and the Clinical Genomic Database, we show that the candidate CNVRs identified by PeakCNV for neurodevelopmental disorders overlap with a greater number of genes with the brain-enriched expression, and a greater number of genes that are associated with neurological conditions compared to candidate CNVRs identified by other tools. Taken together, PeakCNV outperformed current existing CNV association study tools by identifying more biologically meaningful CNVRs relevant to the phenotype of interest. PeakCNV is publicly available for the analysis of CNV-associated diseases and is accessible from https://rdrr.io/github/mahdieh1/PeakCNV.

Introduction: Various studies have demonstrated the benefits of using distributed fog computing for the Internet of Things (IoT). Fog computing has brought cloud computing capabilities such as computing, storage, and processing closer to IoT nodes. The new model of fog and edge computing, compared to cloud computing, provides less latency for data processing by bringing resources closer to users. This is essential for delay-sensitive applications such as remote healthcare and provides more reliable services. In this study, a fog-based system was proposed to monitor the condition of heart patients. Method: This study was a developmental-applied one. A set of data relevant to coronary heart patients available in the machine learning data repository of the University of California Irvine was used for evaluation. In this system, each of the heart patient's symptoms is evaluated based on the normal range in the fog layer and the status of the patient is determined. In this layer, requests are prioritized based on the number of symptoms that are out of the normal range. The efficiency of the proposed system was evaluated in terms of network usage time, latency, and response time. Results: The system presented in this study led to the improvement of network usage time by 23.77%, reduction of latency by 23.71%, and enhancement of response time by 32.95%. Conclusion: Using the priority queue to prioritize requests at the fog layer reduces the response time to emergency requests.

Early diagnosis, prioritization, screening, clustering, and tracking of patients with COVID-19, and production of drugs and vaccines are some of the applications that have made it necessary to use a new style of technology to involve, manage, and deal with this epidemic. Strategies backed by artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been undeniably effective to understand how the virus works and prevent it from spreading. Accordingly, the main aim of this survey is to critically review the ML, IoT, and the integration of IoT and ML-based techniques in the applications related to COVID-19, from the diagnosis of the disease to the prediction of its outbreak. According to the main findings, IoT provided a prompt and efficient approach to tracking the disease spread. On the other hand, most of the studies developed by ML-based techniques aimed at the detection and handling of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Among different approaches, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Support Vector Machine, Genetic CNN, and pre-trained CNN, followed by ResNet have demonstrated the best performances compared to other methods.

In our digital age, data are generated constantly from public and private sources, social media platforms, and the Internet of Things. A significant portion of this information comes in the form of unstructured images and videos, such as the 95 million daily photos and videos shared on Instagram and the 136 billion images available on Google Images. Despite advances in image processing and analytics, the current state of the art lacks effective methods for discovering, linking, and comprehending image data. Consider, for instance, the images from a crime scene that hold critical information for a police investigation. Currently, no system can interactively generate a comprehensive narrative of events from the incident to the conclusion of the investigation. To address this gap in research, we have conducted a thorough systematic literature review of existing methods, from labeling and captioning to extraction, enrichment, and transforming image data into contextualized information and knowledge. Our review has led us to propose the vision of storytelling with image data, an innovative framework designed to address fundamental challenges in image data comprehension. In particular, we focus on the research problem of understanding image data in general and, specifically, curating, summarizing, linking, and presenting large amounts of image data in a digestible manner to users. In this context, storytelling serves as an appropriate metaphor, as it can capture and depict the narratives and insights locked within the relationships among data stored across different islands. Additionally, a story can be subjective and told from various perspectives, ranging from a highly abstract narrative to a highly detailed one.

The widespread adoption of advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Robotics, is rapidly increasing across the globe. This accelerated pace of change is drastically transforming various aspects of our lives and work, resulting in what is now known as Industry 4.0. As businesses integrate these technologies into their daily operations, it significantly impacts their work tasks and required skill sets. However, the approach to technological transformation varies depending on location, industry, and organization. However, there are no published methods that can adequately forecast the adoption of technology and its impact on society. It is essential to prepare for the future impact of Industry 4.0, and this requires policymakers and business leaders to be equipped with scientifically validated models and metrics. Data-driven scenario planning and decision-making can lead to better outcomes in every area of the business, from learning and development to technology investment. However, the current literature falls short in identifying effective and globally applicable strategies to predict the adoption rate of emerging technologies. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel parametric mathematical model for predicting the adoption rate of emerging technologies through a unique data-driven pipeline. This approach utilizes global indicators for countries to predict the technology adoption curves for each country and industry. The model is thoroughly validated, and the paper outlines highly promising evaluation results. The practical implications of this proposed approach are significant because it provides policymakers and business leaders with valuable insights for decision-making and scenario planning.

Instructors face significant time and effort constraints when grading students’ assessments on a large scale. Clustering similar assessments is a unique and effective technique that has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of instructors in online and large-scale learning environments. By grouping together similar assessments, marking one assessment in a cluster can be scaled to other similar assessments, allowing for a more efficient and streamlined grading process. To address this issue, this paper focuses on text assessments and proposes a method for reducing the workload of instructors by clustering similar assessments. The proposed method involves the use of distributed representation to transform texts into vectors, and contrastive learning to improve the representation that distinguishes the differences among similar texts. The paper presents a general framework for clustering similar texts that includes label representation, K-means, and self-organization map algorithms, with the objective of improving clustering performance using Accuracy (ACC) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) metrics. The proposed framework is evaluated experimentally using two real datasets. The results show that self-organization maps and K-means algorithms with Pre-trained language models outperform label representation algorithms for different datasets.

Abstract Rule-based systems have been used increasingly to augment learning algorithms for annotating data. Rules alleviate many of the shortcomings inherent in pure algorithmic approaches, in cases algorithms are not working well or lack from enough training data. However, in dynamic curation environments where data are constantly changing, there is a need to craft and adapt rules to keep them applicable and precise. Rule adaptation has been proven to be painstakingly difficult and error-prone, as an analyst is needed for examining the precision of rules and applying different modifications to adapt the imprecise ones. In this paper, we present an autonomic and conceptual approach to adapt data annotation rules. Our approach offloads analysts from adapting rules; it boosts rules to annotate a larger number of items using a set of high-level conceptual features, e.g. topic. We utilize a Bayesian multi-armed-bandit algorithm, an online learning algorithm that adapts rules based on the feedback collects from the curation environment over time. We propose a summarization technique, which offers a set of high-level conceptual features for annotating items by identifying the semantical relationships among them. We conduct experiments on different curation domains and compare the performance of our approach with systems relying on analysts for adapting rules. The experimental results show that our approach has a comparative performance to analysts in adapting rules.

The exponential growth of the Web documents has constituted the need for automatic document summarization. In this context, extractive document summarization, i.e., that task of extracting the most relevant information, removing redundancy and presenting the remained data in a coherent and cohesive structure, is a challenging task. In this article, we propose a novel intelligent approach, namely ExDoS, that harvests benefits of both supervised and unsupervised algorithms simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, ExDoS is the first approach to combine both supervised and unsupervised algorithms in a single framework and an interpretable manner for document summarization purpose. ExDoS iteratively minimizes the error rate of the classifier in each cluster with the help of dynamic local feature weighting. Moreover, this approach specifies the contribution of features to discriminate each class, which is a challenging issue in the summarization task. Therefore, in addition to summarizing text, ExDoS is also able to measure the importance of each feature in the summarization process. We evaluate our model both automatically (in terms of ROUGE factor) and empirically (human analysis) on the benchmark datasets: the DUC2002 and CNN/DailyMail. Results show that our model obtains higher ROUGE scores comparing to most state-of-the-art models. The human evaluation also demonstrates that our model is capable of generating informative and readable summaries.

Level of Trust can determine which source of information is reliable and with whom we should share or from whom we should accept information. There are several applications for measuring trust in Online Social Networks (OSNs), including social spammer detection, fake news detection, retweet behaviour detection and recommender systems. Trust prediction is the process of predicting a new trust relation between two users who are not currently connected. In applications of trust, trust relations among users need to be predicted. This process faces many challenges, such as the sparsity of user-specified trust relations, the context-awareness of trust and changes in trust values over time. In this paper, we analyse the state-of-the-art in pair-wise trust prediction models in OSNs, classify them based on different factors, and propose some future directions for researchers interested in this field.

Modern next generation sequencing technologies produce huge amounts of genome-wide data that allow researchers to have a deeper understanding of genomics of organisms. Despite these huge amounts of data, our understanding of the transcriptional regulatory networks is still incomplete. Conformation dependent chromosome interaction maps technologies (Hi-C) have enabled us to detect elements in the genome which interact with each other and regulate the genes. Summarizing these interactions as a data network leads to investigation of the most important properties of the 3D genome structure such as gene co-expression networks. In this work, a Pareto-Based Multi-Objective Optimization algorithm is proposed to detect the co-expressed genomic regions in Hi-C interactions. The proposed method uses fixed sized genomic regions as the vertices of the graph. Number of read between two interacting genomic regions indicate the weight of each edge. The performance of our proposed algorithm was compared to the Multi-Objective PSO algorithm on five networks derived from cis genomic interactions in three Hi-C datasets (GM12878, CD34+ and ESCs). The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms Multi-Objective PSO technique in the identification of co-interacting genomic regions.

With the availability of a large amount of user-generated online data, discovering users’ sequential behaviour has become an integral part of a Sequential Recommender System (SRS). Combining the recent observed items (i.e., short-term preferences) with prior interacted items (i.e., long-term preferences) has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, the existing methods mostly assume that all the adjacent items in a sequence are highly dependent, which may not be practical in real-world scenarios due to the uncertainty of customers’ shopping behaviours. A user-item interaction sequence may contain some irrelevant items which may in turn lead to false dependencies between items. Moreover, current studies usually assign a static representation to each item when modeling a user’s long-term preferences. Therefore, they cannot differentiate the contributions of the items. Specifically, these two types of users’ preferences have been separately modeled and then linearly combined, which may fail to model complicated user-item interactions. In order to overcome the above mentioned problems, we propose a novel Deep Attention-based Sequential (DAS) model. DAS consists of three different blocks, $(i)$ an embedding block: which embeds users and items into low-dimensional spaces; $(ii)$ an attention block: which aims to discriminatively learn dependencies among items in both users’ long-term and short-term item sets; and $(iii)$ a fully-connected block: which first learns a mixture of users’ preferences representation through a nonlinear way and then combines it with users’ embeddings to have a personalized recommendation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in SRSs.

Prostate cancer (PC) is the most frequently diagnosed non-skin cancer in the world. Previous studies have shown that genomic alterations represent the most common mechanism for molecular alterations responsible for the development and progression of PC. This highlights the importance of identifying functional genomic variants for early detection in high-risk PC individuals. Great efforts have been made to identify common protein-coding genetic variations; however, the impact of non-coding variations, including regulatory genetic variants, is not well understood. Identification of these variants and the underlying target genes will be a key step in improving the detection and treatment of PC. To gain an understanding of the functional impact of genetic variants, and in particular, regulatory variants in PC, we developed an integrative pipeline (AGV) that uses whole genome/exome sequences, GWAS SNPs, chromosome conformation capture data, and ChIP-Seq signals to investigate the potential impact of genomic variants on the underlying target genes in PC. We identified 646 putative regulatory variants, of which 30 significantly altered the expression of at least one protein-coding gene. Our analysis of chromatin interactions data (Hi-C) revealed that the 30 putative regulatory variants could affect 131 coding and non-coding genes. Interestingly, our study identified the 131 protein-coding genes that are involved in disease-related pathways, including Reactome and MSigDB, for most of which targeted treatment options are currently available. Notably, our analysis revealed several non-coding RNAs, including RP11-136K7.2 and RAMP2-AS1, as potential enhancer elements of the protein-coding genes CDH12 and EZH1, respectively. Our results provide a comprehensive map of genomic variants in PC and reveal their potential contribution to prostate cancer progression and development.

Here we developed KARAJ, a fast and flexible Linux command-line tool to automate the end-to-end process of querying and downloading a wide range of genomic and transcriptomic sequence data types. The input to KARAJ is a list of PMCIDs or publication URLs or various types of accession numbers to automate four tasks as follows; firstly, it provides a summary list of accessible datasets generated by or used in these scientific articles, enabling users to select appropriate datasets; secondly, KARAJ calculates the size of files that users want to download and confirms the availability of adequate space on the local disk; thirdly, it generates a metadata table containing sample information and the experimental design of the corresponding study; and lastly, it enables users to download supplementary data tables attached to publications. Further, KARAJ provides a parallel downloading framework powered by Aspera connect which reduces the downloading time significantly.

Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience and use domain experts’ knowledge to adapt to new situations. In this context, an intelligent Recommender System should be able to learn from domain experts’ knowledge and experience, as it is vital to know the domain that the items will be recommended. Traditionally, Recommender Systems have been recognized as playlist generators for video/music services (e.g., Netflix and Spotify), e-commerce product recommenders (e.g., Amazon and eBay), or social content recommenders (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). However, Recommender Systems in modern enterprises are highly data-/knowledge-driven and may rely on users’ cognitive aspects such as personality, behavior, and attitude. In this paper, we survey and summarize previously published studies on Recommender Systems to help readers understand our method’s contributions to the field in this context. We discuss the current limitations of the state of the art approaches in Recommender Systems and the need for our new approach: A vision and a general framework for a new type of data-driven, knowledge-driven, and cognition-driven Recommender Systems, namely, Cognitive Recommender Systems. Cognitive Recommender Systems will be the new type of intelligent Recommender Systems that understand the user’s preferences, detect changes in user preferences over time, predict user’s unknown favorites, and explore adaptive mechanisms to enable intelligent actions within the compound and changing environments. We present a motivating scenario in banking and argue that existing Recommender Systems: (i) do not use domain experts’ knowledge to adapt to new situations; (ii) may not be able to predict the ratings or preferences a customer would give to a product (e.g., loan, deposit, or trust service); and (iii) do not support data capture and analytics around customers’ cognitive activities and use it to provide intelligent and time-aware recommendations.

Clustering ensemble indicates to an approach in which a number of (usually weak) base clusterings are performed and their consensus clustering is used as the final clustering. Knowing democratic decisions are better than dictatorial decisions, it seems clear and simple that ensemble (here, clustering ensemble) decisions are better than simple model (here, clustering) decisions. But it is not guaranteed that every ensemble is better than a simple model. An ensemble is considered to be a better ensemble if their members are valid or high-quality and if they participate according to their qualities in constructing consensus clustering. In this paper, we propose a clustering ensemble framework that uses a simple clustering algorithm based on kmedoids clustering algorithm. Our simple clustering algorithm guarantees that the discovered clusters are valid. From another point, it is also guaranteed that our clustering ensemble framework uses a mechanism to make use of each discovered cluster according to its quality. To do this mechanism an auxiliary ensemble named reference set is created by running several kmeans clustering algorithms.