A behavioral sequence analyzing framework for grouping students in an e-learning system

Grouping of students benefits the formation of virtual learning communities, and contributes to collaborative learning space and recommendation. However, the existed grouping criteria are mainly limited in the learning portfolios, profiles, and social attributes etc. In this paper, we aim to build a unified framework for grouping students based on the behavioral sequences and further predicting which group a newcomer will be. The sequences are represented as a series of behavioral trajectories. We discuss a shape descriptor to approximately express the geometrical information of trajectories, and then capture the structural, micro, and hybrid similarities. A weighted undirected graph, using the sequence as a node, the relation as an edge, and the similarity as the weight, is constructed, on which we perform an extended spectral clustering algorithm to find fair groups. In the phase of prediction, an indexing and retrieval scheme is proposed to assign a newcomer to the corresponding group. We conduct some preliminary experiments on a real dataset to test the availability of the framework and to determine the parameterized conditions for an optimal grouping. Additionally, we also experiment on the grouping prediction with a synthetic data generator. Our proposed method outperforms the counterparts and makes grouping more meaningful.