Assessment of Performances of Various Machine Learning Algorithms during Automated Evaluation of Descriptive Answers

Automation of descriptive answers evaluation is the need of the hour because of the huge increase in the number of students enrolling each year in educational institutions and the limited staff available to spare their time for evaluations. In this paper, we use a machine learning workbench called LightSIDE to accomplish auto evaluation and scoring of descriptive answers. We attempted to identify the best supervised machine learning algorithm given a limited training set sample size scenario. We evaluated performances of Bayes, SVM, Logistic Regression, Random forests, Decision stump and Decision trees algorithms. We confirmed SVM as best performing algorithm based on quantitative measurements across accuracy, kappa, training speed and prediction accuracy with supplied test set.