Feature Selection Mechanism for Attention Classification using Gaze Tracking Data

• Published in: 2022 29th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS) pp. 1 - 4
• Main Authors: Khan, Ahsan Raza, Bokhari, Syed Mohsin, Khosravi, Sara, Hussain, Sajjad, Ghannam, Rami, Imran, Muhammad Ali, Zoha, Ahmed
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 24.10.2022
• Subjects: Attention classification; attention monitoring; Education; feature engineering; Feature extraction; gaze tracking; Machine learning algorithms; mind wandering; Psychology; Static VAr compensators; Support vector machine classification; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/ICECS202256217.2022.9970936

The Covid-19 outbreak has caused disruptions in the education sector, making remote education the dominant mode for lecture delivery. The lack of visual feedback and physical interaction makes it very hard for teachers to measure the engagement level of students during lectures. This paper proposes a time-bounded window operation to extract statistical features from raw gaze data, captured in a remote teaching experiment and link them with the student's attention level. Feature selection or dimensionality reduction is performed to reduce the convergence time and overcome the problem of over-fitting. Recursive feature elimination (RFE) and SelectFromModel (SFM) are used with different machine learning (ML) algorithms, and a subset of optimal feature space is obtained based on the feature scores. The model trained using the optimal feature subset showed significant improvement in accuracy and computational complexity. For instance, a support vector classifier (SVC) led 2.39% improvement in accuracy along with approximately 66% reduction in convergence time.