Expert–Novice Level Classification Using Graph Convolutional Network Introducing Confidence-Aware Node-Level Attention Mechanism

Abstract

In this study, we propose a classification method of expert–novice levels using a graph convolutional network (GCN) with a confidence-aware node-level attention mechanism. In classification using an attention mechanism, highlighted features may not be significant for accurate classification, thereby degrading classification performance. To address this issue, the proposed method introduces a confidence-aware node-level attention mechanism into a spatiotemporal attention GCN (STA-GCN) for the classification of expert–novice levels. Consequently, our method can contrast the attention value of each node on the basis of the confidence measure of the classification, which solves the problem of classification approaches using attention mechanisms and realizes accurate classification. Furthermore, because the expert–novice levels have ordinalities, using a classification model that considers ordinalities improves the classification performance. The proposed method involves a model that minimizes a loss function that considers the ordinalities of classes to be classified. By implementing the above approaches, the expert–novice level classification performance is improved.