Michael Murray

University of KwaZulu-Natal | ukzn · Department of Statistics

There is often a significant class imbalance in credit scoring datasets, mainly in portfolios of secured loans such as mortgage loans. A class imbalance occurs when the number of non-default cases outweighs the number of default cases. A naive classifier can achieve high accuracy by assigning all cases to the majority class; however, misclassifying...

Recent South African empirical tests of the ability of equity to act as a hedge against inflation have generally relied on conventional cointegration tests that assume symmetric adjustment between the variables in the cointegrating relationship, however modern international evidence increasingly indicates that the relationship may not be this strai...

In South Africa, almost 50% of the people who take loans cannot afford it. Previously, lenders were able to make deductions from a borrower's payslip but this practice is no longer allowed. Consequently, lenders are now far more vulnerable to default particularly if these loans are no longer being backed by any form of meaningful collateral. The ai...

Over half of all students enrolling at a particular university in KwaZulu-Natal fail to complete a degree. This article is wanting to determine to what extent the marks they obtain for English and Mathematics at school impact on their probability of graduation at this university. In addressing this problem, other student specific factors associated...

The phenomenon of exceptional academic achievement in South African higher education is under-researched and frequently overshadowed by concerns around failure, underachievement, and poor quality of throughput. This paper reports on a study of exceptional academic achievement in one South African university. Taking a selection of contextually relev...

In South Africa, the Department of Education allocates funds to universities by means of a funding formula that focuses primarily on student throughput and academic staff-based research productivity. Accordingly, South African universities have developed their own strategies to help improve their student throughput and staff publication rates. In t...

The University of KwaZulu-Natal is now six years post merger – time to reflect as the institution is now well settled. Modules are offered on multiple campuses, at various levels, ranging from entry level modules through to Ph.D. studies. This article attempts to identify the factors that lead to the successful progression of students to higher lev...

Research output affects both the strength and funding of universities. Accordingly university academic staff members are under pressure to be active and productive in research. Though all academics have research interest, all are not producing research output which is accredited by the Department of Education (DOE). We analyzed the demographic and...

Protective gill-nets (shark nets) have been successful in reducing the frequency of shark attacks on the coast of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, since 1952. This is achieved primarily through a local reduction in numbers of large sharks. Yet the nets are non-selective in terms of shark species caught and take a by-catch of dolphins, sea turtles...