PONE-D-21-35650A Survival Analysis based Volatility and Sparsity Modeling Network for Student Dropout PredictionPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Pan,

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PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The article is a valuable and original scientific contribution, so I must congratulate the authors for their great work. However, it would be advisable to resolve some shortcomings before being published.

1- Research questions, that drive the paper, should be built in the introduction from an ongoing and pertinent bibliography (up to 2021). These should be of global interest and not focused to a particular local problem. Identifying a research gap is not enough; key is showing its significance to the field.

2- Answer your research question in the conclusions; what did we learn compared with current, significant research .

3- How general are your results? These have to be of interest to the whole community. Relate these with your limitations. .

4- In the conclusion section, the limitations of this study, suggested improvements of this work and future directions should be highlighted.

5- The research problem is not clear, and it needs to be supported and explained why the researchers did the research

Reviewer #2: I am very grateful to the editor for inviting me to participate in the review of this research. I think this research is very interesting, and the authors have done as much analysis and results as possible, which is important. However, I have to point out that this research still needs to be revised, and the authors should ensure that the manuscript can be revised as well as possible before it can be considered for publication.

Title. The authors study the dropout rate of online learning courses, so we should make it clear, otherwise it will be easily confused with traditional dropout rate.

Abstract. Authors should focus their writing on the content of this study instead of spending a lot of time explaining the research reasons.

Introduce. I think the authors should introduce the previous literature analysis in this research field, which can help readers to understand more intuitively why this research is meaningful, rather than the authors' independent explanation. In addition, how is Survival Analysis adopted as an effective method to solve this problem? For a simple example, Survival Analysis has been applied to similar fields and is considered effective. I think the authors can briefly explain it from this angle. The significance of this research is actually more credible than that of self-explanation. In the last paragraph of this part, this is the first time i saw this kind of structure introduction about the full text in the manuscript, and I suggest that the authors adopt experimental design or process to explain it.

Related Works. I don't quite understand this expression adopted by the authors, which is consistent with the suggestions I put forward in my introduction. I think this part is more like a theoretical basis or a literature review. Specific authors can refer to the specific requirements of journals for revising the manuscript framework. At the same time, in this part, I only saw the introduction of three key words, but I didn't see in detail the collation and summary of the authors' previous research on these contents. I think this is very important, because it can highlight the importance and value of this research.

Methods. I think that the authors' calculation of the model is OK, but what needs to be pointed out is that they are relatively weak in literal expression, which makes my reading of the whole calculation process not smooth. I suggest that the authors further sort out the logic of expression.

Experiment. First of all, I need a serious description of this part, which means that it needs to be greatly revised. The authors are not clear about the source of the data. It is not advisable to introduce only some numerical values. Every step of the experiment needs to be explained clearly. At the same time, I realize that if it involves the examination of courses and students, whether this research has obtained the ethical review is very important for publishing, and it is the criterion that authors need to follow. If it is not involved, it needs to be clearly explained.

Result. I actually agree with the authors' statements in the results section, but I still want to suggest whether the authors should incorporate other proven methods to further verify the accuracy of your research, because I personally don't think the existing sensitive analysis is enough to verify the reliability of the research.

Conclusion. Maybe it's because of the space. I don't think the authors have done a good job in this part. I suggest that the authors elaborate on some suggestions of this study for reducing the dropout rate. That is, integrating and analyzing the findings of the existing research, the reality and the findings of this study will help to study the by going up one flight of stairs at the application level, and will also increase the readability of the whole manuscript.

Finally, I appreciate the authors' research very much, but I hope you can make a good revision to ensure that your research can be published. Congratulations on doing a very good research.

Reviewer #3: An interesting study, to investigate the issue of student dropout prediction in massive open online courses with a sound methodological approach. A discussion section should be added after results to elaborate the link of your findings with the prior literature.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Huaruo Chen

Reviewer #3: No

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A Survival Analysis based Volatility and Sparsity Modeling Network for Student Dropout Prediction

PONE-D-21-35650R1

Dear Dr. Pan,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Sathishkumar V E

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: No Comments

The researchers made appropriate modifications to the article. The article in its current state is accepted for publication.

I thank the efforts of the researchers.

Reviewer #2: I appreciate that the authors were able to make a lot of changes based on the reviewers' comments. However, I don't see that all my previous suggestions have been revised by the authors. Another important point is that the authors should submit vector images, for example in png format when saving. The current images are still blurry and clearly not enough to meet the requirements for publication.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: usama mohamed ibrahem

Reviewer #2: No