Empirical study of college students’ extracurricular reading preference by functional data analysis of the library book borrowing behavior

Library data contains many students’ reading records that reflect their general knowledge acquisition. The purpose of this study is to deeply mine the library book-borrowing data, with concerns on different book catalogues and properties to predict the students’ extracurricular interests. An intelligent computing framework is proposed by the fusion of a neural network architecture and a partial differential equations (PDE) function module. In model designs, the architecture is constructed as an adaptive learning backpropagation neural network (BPNN), with automatic tuning of its hyperparameters. The PDE module is embedded into the network structure to enhance the loss functions of each neural perceptron. For model evaluation, a novel comprehensive index is designed using the calculus of information entropy. Empirical experiments are conducted on a diverse and multimodal time-series dataset of library book borrowing records to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Results validate that the proposed framework is capable of revealing the students’ extracurricular reading interests by processing related book borrowing records, and expected to be applied to “big data” analysis for a wide range of various libraries.