Visual Analytic Method for Students’ Association via Modularity Optimization

Students spend most of their time living and studying on campus, especially in Asia, and they form various types of associations in addition to those with classmates and roommates. It is necessary for university authorities to master these types of associations, so as to provide appropriate services...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: XiaoYong Li, QinYang Yu, Yong Zhang, JinWei Dai, BaoCai Yin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-04-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/8/2813
Description
Summary:Students spend most of their time living and studying on campus, especially in Asia, and they form various types of associations in addition to those with classmates and roommates. It is necessary for university authorities to master these types of associations, so as to provide appropriate services, such as psychological guidance and academic advice. With the rapid development of the “smart campus,” many kinds of student behavior data are recorded, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to deeply analyze students’ associations. In this paper, we propose a visual analytic method to construct students’ association networks by computing the similarity of their behavior data. We discover student communities using the popular Louvain (or BGLL) algorithm, which can extract community structures based on modularity optimization. Using various visualization charts, we visualized associations among students so as to intuitively express them. We evaluated our method using the real behavior data of undergraduates in a university in Beijing. The experimental results indicate that this method is effective and intuitive for student association analysis.
ISSN:2076-3417