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Feature selection has received a lot of attention in the machine learning community, but mainly under the supervised paradigm. In this work we study the potential benefits of feature selection in hierarchical clustering tasks. Particularly we address this problem in the context of incremental clustering, following the basic ideas of Gennari [8]. By using a simple implementation, we show that a feature selection scheme running in parallel with the learning process can improve the clustering task under the dimensions of accuracy, efficiency in learning, efficiency in prediction and comprehensibility.

Aquesta és una còpia de la versió author's final draft d'un article publicat a la revista Expert systems with Applications. AbstractCollaborative student modeling in adaptive learning environments allows the learners to inspect and modify their own student models. It is often considered as a collaboration between students and the system to promote learners' reflection and to collaboratively assess the course. When adaptive learning environments are used in the classroom, teachers act as a guide through the learning process. Thus, they need to monitor students' interactions in order to understand and evaluate their activities. Although, the knowledge gained through this monitorization can be extremely useful to student modeling, collaboration between teachers and the system to achieve this goal has not been considered in the literature. In this paper we present a framework to support teachers in this task. In order to prove the usefulness of this framework we have implemented and evaluated it in an adaptive web-based educational system called PDinamet.

ÐStatistical research in clustering has almost universally focused on data sets described by continuous features and its methods are difficult to apply to tasks involving symbolic features. In addition, these methods are seldom concerned with helping the user in interpreting the results obtained. Machine learning researchers have developed conceptual clustering methods aimed at solving these problems. Following a long term tradition in AI, early conceptual clustering implementations employed logic as the mechanism of concept representation. However, logical representations have been criticized for constraining the resulting cluster structures to be described by necessary and sufficient conditions. An alternative are probabilistic concepts which associate a probability or weight with each property of the concept definition. In this paper, we propose a symbolic hierarchical clustering model that makes use of probabilistic representations and extends the traditional ideas of specificity-generality typically found in machine learning. We propose a parameterized measure that allows users to specify both the number of levels and the degree of generality of each level. By providing some feedback to the user about the balance of the generality of the concepts created at each level and given the intuitive behavior of the user parameter, the system improves user interaction in the clustering process.