Title: Conceptual clustering of university graduate students' trajectories using formal concept analysis: a case study in Lebanon

Authors: Charbel Obeid; Christine Lahoud; Hicham El Khoury; Pierre-Antoine Champin

Addresses: LIRIS, University Lyon 1, France ' Faculty of Engineering, French University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt ' LaRRIS, Faculty of Science, Lebanese University, Lebanon ' LIRIS, University Lyon 1, France

Abstract: Due to the weak academic advising systems in most schools, students need assistance to explore universities/colleges and study fields that match their interests and future careers. Unfortunately, the orientation programs in most schools are not well designed to cater to students' varied needs. While career orientation programs are much needed at schools, a large number of Lebanese schools have not integrated such programs in their educational systems yet. Thus, this research focuses on developing a hybrid recommender system based on machine learning techniques. Our research focuses on the implementation of the formal concept analysis (FCA) to study university graduates' trajectories. This data mining technique is applied in knowledge presentation and data processing. FCA enables the discovery of hidden knowledge by using association rule mining and machine learning. The objective of this study is to discover the university graduates' trajectories and demonstrate the effectiveness of the FCA technique in data clustering.

Keywords: formal concept analysis; FCA; concept lattice; students' trajectories; recommender system; Lebanon.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2020.108541

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2020 Vol.30 No.3, pp.295 - 312

Accepted: 21 Nov 2019
Published online: 16 Jul 2020 *

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