Association Analysis of Alumni Giving: A Formal Concept Analysis

摘要

Alargesample (initially33, 000casesrepresentingatenpercenttrial) ofuniversityalumnigiving records for a large public university in the southwestern United States is analyzed by Formal Concept Analysis. This likely represents the initial attempt to perform analysis of such data by means ofa machine learning technique. The variables employed include the gift amount to the universityfoundation as well as traditional demographic variables such as year ofgraduation, gender, ethnicity, marital status, etc. The foundation serves as one of the institution's non-profit, fund-raising organizations. It pursues substantial gifts that are designatedfor the educational or leadership programs of the giver's choice. Although they process gifts of all sizes, thefoundation's focus is on major gifts andendowments. AssociationAnalysis ofthe given dataset is a two-step process. In the first step, FCA is applied to identify concepts and their relationships and in the second step, the association rules are definedfor each concept. The hypothesis examined in this paper is that the generosity ofalumni toward his/her alma mater can be predicted using association rules obtained by applying the Formal Concept Analysis approach. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]