Symbolic fuzzy clustering for mining user profiles
Giovanna Castellano, Ciro Castiello, Anna Maria Fanelli, M. Sidella · 2003
The user modeling problem is generally considered a very important issue in the field of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems. In our work we investigate the particular context of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems, where the users are learners. The paper proposes a symbolic fuzzy c-means algorithm which can be used to prototype learners in form of profiles; the algorithm works on the basis of symbolic data representing a set of answers to a questionnaire. The key feature of the proposed algorithm is the ability to handle data characterized by qualitative and/or quantitative features. The adopted strategy has been verified on a set of response data concerning an English grammar questionnaire and the obtained experimental results are reported.