COMMUNITY MINING AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

• Author / Creator

  Rabbany khorasgani, Reihaneh

• Information networks represent relations in data, relationships typically ignored in iid (independent and identically distributed) data. Such networks abound, like coauthorships in bibliometrics, cellphone call graphs in telecommunication, students interactions in Education, etc. A large body of work has been devoted to the analysis
  of these networks and the discovery of their underlying structure, specifically, finding the communities in them. Communities are groups of nodes in the network that are relatively cohesive within the set compared to the outside.
  This thesis proposes Top Leaders, a fast and accurate community mining approach for both weighted and unweighted networks. Top Leaders regards a community as a set of followers congregating around a potential leader and works based on a novel measure of closeness inspired by the theory of diffusion of innovations.
  Moreover, it proposes Meerkat-ED, a specific and practical toolbox for analyzing students’ interactions in online courses. It applies social network analysis techniques including community mining to evaluate participation of students in asynchronous discussion forums.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Community Mining
  • Social Network Analysis
  • E-learning

• Graduation date

  Fall 2010

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R34X4X

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.