PREDICTING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF WEB INFORMATION SYSTEMS USING NEURAL NETWORKS MODELING: FRAMEWORK & EMPIRICAL TESTING

Abstract

The information systems (IS) assessment studies have still used the commonly traditional tools such as questionnaires in evaluating the dependent variables and specially effectiveness of systems. Artificial neural networks have been recently accepted as an effective alternative tool for modeling the complicated systems and widely used for forecasting. A very few is known about the employment of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in the prediction IS effectiveness. For this reason, this study is considered as one of the fewest studies to investigate the efficiency and capability of using ANN for forecasting the user perceptions towards IS effectiveness where MATLAB is utilized for building and training the neural network model. A dataset of 175 subjects collected from international organization are utilized for ANN learning where each subject consists of 6 features (5 quality factors as inputs and one Boolean output). A percentage of 75% o subjects are used in the training phase. The results indicate an evidence on the ANN models has a reasonable accuracy in forecasting the IS effectiveness. For prediction, ANN with PURELIN (ANNP) and ANN with TANSIG (ANNTS) transfer functions are used. It is found that both two models have a reasonable prediction, however, the accuracy of ANNTS model is better than ANNP model (88.6% and 70.4% respectively). As the study proposes a new model for predicting IS dependent variables, it could save the considerably high cost that might be spent in sample data collection in the quantitative studies in the fields science, management, education, arts and others.