Using localized features for analyzing college students' imagination

The analysis of imagination has become popular in recent years because imagination is one of the key components of creativity and innovation. For extracting students' implicit degrees and thought processes of imagination, we use frequent pattern mining and association rule extraction to localize the features and explain the deep meanings of imagination in the study. By our observations, these two methods may sometimes explore meaningless frequent patterns and rules on a global sparse dataset. In order to eliminate such phenomena when mining with these two methods, we use a localized feature approach called forecast with clustering and integration (FCI) to improve the drawbacks of two methods on a sparse dataset. The approach consists of two strategies. One is clustering and the other is the prediction based on integration from (1) frequent patterns, (2) association rule pruning with correlation, and (3) forecast with linear regression. The former strategy can reduce the number of samples and highlight the features of imagination and the latter strategy can prune meaningless information and predict the trend of scores from imagination input data. Experimental results show both proposed approaches can localize special features, thereby providing supervisors with meaningful information about students' degrees and thought processes of imagination.