Claims

On the TU/e CS overlap dataset, supervised NLP classifiers (Random Forest, XGBoost) outperform thresholding and zero-shot LLM baselines at detecting course overlap

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · design r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 2 of 2 entries) · not reviewed by a person · recheck by 2029: tool and model accuracy changes quickly

Subclaims

Reading the evidence codes

q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.

This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.

q2 i? In 5-fold cross-validation on the TU/e dataset, Random Forest achieved F1 = 0.74 and XGBoost F1 = 0.73, the best balance of precision and recall among evaluated methods. → Arthur Nijdam 2026 q2 i? Zero-shot LLMs achieved relatively high precision but very low recall, making them too conservative for this application. → Arthur Nijdam 2026 (2)

Evidence

Arthur Nijdam 2026

Arthur Nijdam, Paul Stankovski Wagner, Sara Ramezanian. (2026). CourseGraph: Finding overlaps and differences in Computer Science courses across universities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05910 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2608.05910

q2 · i? · design · r2

5-fold cross-validation on the TU/e CS dataset (60 overlapping and 180 non-overlapping pairs) comparing thresholding, classical ML, and zero-shot LLMs. The article reports "F1 scores of 0.74 and 0.73" for Random Forest and XGBoost, with XGBoost accuracy 0.85 (±0.03).

"The supervised NLP methods perform best overall. Random Forest and XGBoost provide the best balance between precision and recall, with F1 scores of 0.74 and 0.73, respectively."

Arthur Nijdam 2026 (2)

Arthur Nijdam, Paul Stankovski Wagner, Sara Ramezanian. (2026). CourseGraph: Finding overlaps and differences in Computer Science courses across universities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05910

q2 · i? · design · r2

Cross-validated comparison on the TU/e dataset shows ChatGPT-5.4, ChatGPT-5.4-mini, and DeepSeek-V3 reach high precision (0.69–0.74) but recall of only 0.17–0.30, so the authors judge them "too conservative for our application".

"The zero-shot LLMs achieve relatively high precision but very low recall, making them too conservative for our application, where missing overlapping courses is more costly than false positives."

Discussion

Page metadata
Field Value
type claim
id rf-xgboost-beat-thresholds-and-llms-on-course-overlap
title On the TU/e CS overlap dataset, supervised NLP classifiers (Random Forest, XGBoost) outperform thresholding and zero-shot LLM baselines at detecting course overlap
description On the TU/e CS overlap dataset, supervised NLP classifiers (Random Forest, XGBoost) outperform thresholding and zero-shot LLM baselines at detecting course overlap
status review
evidence_strength moderate
newest_evidence 2026
source_checked 2026-10-20
recheck_by 2029
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-10
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 2 — arthur-nijdam-2026, arthur-nijdam-2026-2

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