Annexure II

The thesis is a good attempt to develop a machine learning tool to predict the presence of
learning ability. The candidate has taken effort in appropriate real data collection and designed a
questionnaire for this purpose. The thesis attempts to gain new insights into interrelationships
between symptoms of LD, their relative importance and significance in classification have been
gained. The candidate has studied the problem of LD classification using many existing machine
learning algorithms such as Apriori, Neural network, Decision Tree, SVM and bagging. The
various classification results have been compared using the available 1020 cases. The candidate
has then strived to improve the performance of existing algorithms by using a new correlation
based missing value imputing pre-processing methods to improve classification accuracy. The
candidate has also applied fuzzy and rough set models for LD prediction. The thesis addresses an
important area and the user friendly tool is a real step towards faster detection of LD.

However the candidate could have better analyzed the results obtained by applying different
machine learning algorithms specifically for LD detection by discussing the type and nature of
features used in the classification. This discussion would have led to the type of preprocessing
necessary to improve the performance of the classifiers, and the need for Fuzzy and Rough set
based models.