Deterministic Preprocessing and Interpretable Fuzzy Banding for Cost-per-Student Reporting from Extracted Records

2026-03-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the opacity in cost allocation arising from the direct use of administrative data exports for budgeting and governance decisions, which often lack verifiable and reproducible processing pipelines. To enhance transparency, the work proposes a deterministic, rule-based data processing framework that aggregates student-level costs and enrollment counts from ad hoc academic databases to compute per-student costs. It innovatively integrates SHA-256 input hashing for auditability with a year-anchor-driven fuzzy segmentation strategy—employing left-shoulder, triangular, and right-shoulder membership functions—to enable traceable recomputation and interpretable labeling (low/medium/high). The output is a standardized workbook containing processing summaries, trend analyses, subject-specific reports, and segmentation labels, substantially improving decision-making transparency, reproducibility, and audit support.

Technology Category

Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, TrustApplication Domains: Humanities & Computational Social ScienceKnowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning

Application Category

Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenanceEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasetsResponsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

Administrative extracts are often exchanged as spreadsheets and may be read as reports in their own right during budgeting, workload review, and governance discussions. When an exported workbook becomes the reference snapshot for such decisions, the transformation can be checked by recomputation against a clearly identified input. A deterministic, rule-governed, file-based workflow is implemented in cad_processor.py. The script ingests a Casual Academic Database (CAD) export workbook and aggregates inclusive on-costs and student counts into subject-year and school-year totals, from which it derives cost-per-student ratios. It writes a processed workbook with four sheets: Processing Summary (run record and counters), Trend Analysis (schoolyear cost-per-student matrix), Report (wide subject-level table), and Fuzzy Bands (per-year anchors, membership weights, and band labels). The run record includes a SHA-256 hash of the input workbook bytes to support snapshot-matched recomputation. For within-year interpretation, the workflow adds a simple fuzzy banding layer that labels finite, positive school-year cost-per-student values as Low, Medium, or High. The per-year anchors are the minimum, median, and maximum of the finite, positive ratios. Membership weights are computed using left-shoulder, triangular, and right-shoulder functions, with deterministic tie-breaking in a fixed priority order (Medium, then Low, then High). These weights are treated as decision-support signals rather than probabilities. A worked example provides a reproducible calculation of a band assignment from the reported anchors and ratios. Supplementary material includes a claim-to-evidence matrix, a reproducibility note, and a short glossary that links selected statements to code and workbook artefacts.

Problem

• cost-per-student reporting
• deterministic preprocessing
• interpretable fuzzy banding
• administrative data extraction
• decision support

Innovation

• deterministic preprocessing
• interpretable fuzzy banding
• cost-per-student reporting
• reproducible workflow
• membership weighting