Search results for "Robust Clustering"
showing 7 items of 7 documents
Towards Evidence-Based Academic Advising Using Learning Analytics
2018
Academic advising is a process between the advisee, adviser and the academic institution which provides the degree requirements and courses contained in it. Content-wise planning and management of the student’ study path, guidance on studies and academic career support is the main joint activity of advising. The purpose of this article is to propose the use of learning analytics methods, more precisely robust clustering, for creation of groups of actual study profiles of students. This allows academic advisers to provide evidence-based information on the study paths that have actually happened similarly to individual students. Moreover, academic institutions can focus on management and upda…
Feature Ranking of Large, Robust, and Weighted Clustering Result
2017
A clustering result needs to be interpreted and evaluated for knowledge discovery. When clustered data represents a sample from a population with known sample-to-population alignment weights, both the clustering and the evaluation techniques need to take this into account. The purpose of this article is to advance the automatic knowledge discovery from a robust clustering result on the population level. For this purpose, we derive a novel ranking method by generalizing the computation of the Kruskal-Wallis H test statistic from sample to population level with two different approaches. Application of these enlargements to both the input variables used in clustering and to metadata provides a…
Analysing Student Performance using Sparse Data of Core Bachelor Courses
2015
Curricula for Computer Science (CS) degrees are characterized by the strong occupational orientation of the discipline. In the BSc degree structure, with clearly separate CS core studies, the learning skills for these and other required courses may vary a lot, which is shown in students' overall performance. To analyze this situation, we apply nonstandard educational data mining techniques on a preprocessed log file of the passed courses. The joint variation in the course grades is studied through correlation analysis while intrinsic groups of students are created and analyzed using a robust clustering technique. Since not all students attended all courses, there is a nonstructured sparsity…
Discovering Gender-Specific Knowledge from Finnish Basic Education using PISA Scale Indices
2014
The Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, is a worldwide study to assess knowledge and skills of 15- year-old students. Results of the latest PISA survey conducted in 2012 were published in December 2013. According to the results, Finland is one of the few countries where girls performed better in mathematics than boys. The purpose of this work is to refine the analysis of this observation by using education data mining techniques. More precisely, as part of standard PISA preprocessing phase certain scale indices are constructed based on information gathered from the background questionnaire of each participating student. The indices describe, e.g., students’ engagement, dri…
Understanding the Study Experiences of Students in Low Agency Profile: Towards a Smart Education Approach
2020
In this paper, we use student agency analytics to examine how university students who assessed to have low agency resources describe their study experiences. Students ( n=292 ) completed the Agency of University Students (AUS) questionnaire. Furthermore, they reported what kinds of restrictions they experienced during the university course they attended. Four different agency profiles were identified using robust clustering. We then conducted a thematic analysis of the open-ended answers of students who assessed to have low agency resources. Issues relating to competence beliefs, self-efficacy, student-teacher relations, time as a resource, student well-being, and course contents seemed to …
Improvements and applications of the elements of prototype-based clustering
2018
Clustering or cluster analysis is an essential part of data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The most popularly applied clustering methods are partitioning-based or prototype-based methods. Prototype-based clustering methods usually have easy implementability and good scalability. These methods, such as K-means clustering, have been used for different applications in various fields. On the other hand, prototype-based clustering methods are typically sensitive to initialization, and the selection of the number of clusters for knowledge discovery purposes is not straightforward. In the era of big data, in high-velocity, ever-growing datasets, which can also be erroneous, outl…
Supporting Institutional Awareness and Academic Advising using Clustered Study Profiles
2017
The purpose of academic advising is to help students with developing educational plans that support their academic career and personal goals, and to provide information and guidance on studies. Planning and management of the students’ study path is the main joint activity in advising. Based on a study log of passed courses, we propose to use robust, prototype-based clustering to identify a set of actual study path profiles. Such profiles identify groups of students with similar progress of studies, whose analysis and interpretation can be used for better institutional awareness and to support evidence-based academic advising. A model of automated academic advising system utilizing the possi…