On the Discovery of Educational Patterns using Biclustering

摘要

The world-wide drive for academic excellence is placing new requirements on educational data analysis, triggering the need to find less-trivial educational patterns in non-identically distributed data with noise, missing values and non-constant relations. Biclustering, the discovery of a subset of objects (whether students, teachers, researchers, courses and degrees) correlated on a subset of attributes (performance indicators), has unique properties of interest thus being positioned to satisfy the aforementioned needs. Despite its relevance, the potentialities of applying biclustering in the educational domain remain unexplored. This work proposes a structured view on how to apply biclustering to comprehensively explore educational data, with a focus on how to guarantee actionable, robust and statistically significant results. The gathered results from student performance data confirm the relevance of biclustering educational data.