Browsing by Author "Kumara, M. S. M. S."

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A clustering based quantitative approach on selecting companies in an investment portfolio in Colombo Stock Exchange
(4th International Research Symposium on Pure and Applied Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2019) Kumara, M. S. M. S.; Liyanage, U. P.
Portfolio management is a powerful concept in financial sector, heavily studied by both investors and researchers. Conventionally, investment portfolios on stocks available in stock markets, constitute by set of stocks belonging to numerous companies and their associated allocations. Additionally, the standard portfolio procedure results the optimum allocation of shares of selected set of companies, with the minimum risk. Nevertheless, the selection of companies in a portfolio is utterly depends on the experiences as well as the gut-feelings of investor or the broker. Thereby, this selection criterion is essentially conditional on qualitative measures that have no numerical justifications. This research aims to introduce a quantitative approach towards selecting companies into a portfolio based on their historical data so that the portfolio optimization procedure can overcome the qualitative bias. The analysis has been conducted using the stocks belonging to companies registered at the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka. The data consisting of daily share prices of 291 companies registered at CSE for the period 2012-2016. The company risk is measured by the volatility of its stock prices over the time. In standard portfolios, there is a mix of companies with various risks. Technically, here a novel mechanism to determine composition of companies in such portfolio based on risk levels has been introduced. Different risk levels are determined by using K-Mean clustering technique applied on the volatility of companies. Since the history of stock prices essentially determine the risk levels, the volatility has been captured so that it would reflect the historical behavior of the company’s stock prices. Consequently, volatility has taken as a vector that has elements consisting of corresponding variance measured by quarterly basis. Number of quarters resulting the dimension of volatility-vector, is selected as four in this study. The clustering procedure determining the risk levels is based on the volatility-vectors computed on each company, used to obtain five classes of companies with different risk levels. Sorting the classes by mean risk from low to high, allows to select the composition of companies in the considered portfolio. In this research, to establish the portfolio, proportion of companies (0:3:4:3:0) belonging to classes from low to high risks, are selected. This selection allows to balance the risk among companies within the portfolio. The study shows that portfolios have higher return can be constructed by such selections from the clusters appropriately. Further investigation of selection criterion based on such proportions have been analyzed
Survey on the acceptance of online education in state universities of Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic situation
(Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2021) Mahanama, K. R. T. S.; Mohamed, A. R. W.; Wickramarathne, R. A. S.; Pathirana, G. P. N. M.; Kumara, H. H. D.; Pathirana, M. P. R. L.; Wickramanayaka, M. P. A. T.; Gunawardena, S. L. H.; Dias, M. J. R.; Ihsan, M. I.; Kaushalya, K. D.; Kumara, M. S. M. S.
Online education is a mode of electronically facilitated distance education method. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, global educational institutions transformed into online platforms. As a developing nation, Sri Lanka had to make a rapid transition from face-to-face to the online teaching-learning process. According to the Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, only 22.2% of households owned desktop or laptop computers (2020). Consequently, the availability and accessibility of infrastructure to transform into an online education platform are at a question. Hence, to appraise this current situation based on students’ points of view, a sample survey was conducted to explore the acceptance of online education mechanisms in state universities of Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. As a first step, a pilot study was conducted on 44 undergraduates, who were selected by convenience sampling. With the experience of the pilot survey, the final questionnaire was fine-tuned with 27 questions, and it was delivered to the undergraduates in 14 state universities employing the snowball sampling technique. Based on observation of the pilot study, the required minimum sample size was found to be 570 with a margin of error of 0.04. Finally, a descriptive analysis was performed using 574 responses using Minitab software. Most of the students are more inclined to use online lectures (33%) and videos (55.3%). From 64.2% who had online sessions for practical courses, 38.9% are dissatisfied. Even though 36.3% had faced network problems, regular and usual participation figures were approximately 70%. 57.6% of the respondents in the sample are females, and among them, a higher percentage (44.8%) were participating in online lectures regularly compared to that of males (25.4%). The majority of the student has complained of difficulties in health problems (81%), inability in raising questions (64.9%), understanding course contents (86.9%), and heavy workload (89.4%). Overall, comparisons of face-to-face and online lectures revealed that the majority preferred face-to-face lectures (43.8%), and a significant proportion accepted both study modes (39.3%). On average, the acceptance of online education is ranked 2.86 on a scale of 1 (highly reject) to 5 (highly accept). Based on the findings, it is recommended to strengthen the interactions between students and lecturers, conduct break-through room assignments during the lectures, and use multiple communication platforms. In addition, student grievances can be accommodated by relaxing deadlines on assessment, aiding of educational, technical, and financial needs.