SWENG545 Final Term Paper
Michael T. Elliott
Data Analytics MPS Candidate
Pennsylvania State University
Abstract—The changing trends, as well as the new generations
of students have brought to light the need for the BFA program at
the University of Diploma Printing to be revisited and
restructured. The chief of the committee has presented two
different datasets to aid in the analysis of the restructuring of the
curriculum. The main objectives of this restructuring are to
eliminate obsolete electives and keep those that are still relevant,
as well as determine specializations within the electives that make
up three or four courses. These specializations will allow students
to add concentration areas to their study. By using KNIME
Analytics Platform, we are able to easily utilize a variety of data
mining techniques to aid in this analysis.
Keywords—Data Analysis, KNIME Analytics Platform,
Clustering Analysis, Association Rule Mining, Data Mining
I. BUSINESS UNDERSTANDING
A. Understanding Objective
In order to keep up with current styles and trends, the
Department of Arts at the University of Diploma Printing is
looking to revamp its BFA curriculum. The University of
Diploma Printing is located in Romanigstan and hosts over 240
undergraduate majors within its BA and BFA programs. The
professors within the arts department feature world renowned
artists from many different artistic disciplines. The dean of the
college of arts has approached the faculty about the issues that
have been plaguing the department.
Over the past five years, enrollment has plateaued in the
BFA program, disciplinary approaches have shifted, and key
demographics within the university are changing. Despite the
setbacks within the BFA program, the rest of the College of
Arts and Sciences continues to be one of the fastest growing
colleges within the university. These issues have led to the need
for the BFA curriculum to be reviewed and restructured, with
the hopes of increasing enrollment trends that match the rest of
the college.
B. Assess the Situation
The current structure accounts for seven core courses and
six electives. To complement the reduction in credit hours, the
analysis will also focus on determining key concentrations
within the offered electives, as well as obsoleting the electives
that are not popular to help lead the way for new course
offerings. To aid in these requests, this analysis will focus on
two main topics. It will first focus on optimizing the elective
courses that are offered within the BFA program. In particular,
the analysis will focus on determining the most popular
electives to keep in the program. It will also look to group
electives into key concentration areas, that way students can
choose special concentrations within the program.
The chief of the committee has provided a list of the
currently offered courses as well a historic record of student
enrollment for the past five years to aid in this analysis.
C. Data Mining Goals
To accomplish these tasks, we will need to analyze the
trends within the elective courses in order to determine which
courses are most popular, and which courses are obsolete.
From here, we will want to then determine a way to
effectively show which courses should be grouped together. By
grouping the elective courses together, we can determine
specialties within the major that students can obtain.
D. Project Plan
Our first step will be to understand our data and figure out
what is has to offer. From here, the two data sets will need to
be joined together so that we will be able to compare student
enrollment history to our current list of courses.
Once the data has been processed and cleaned, we will need
to visit the elective course offerings and determine which
courses are obsolete. To do this, we will want to show a time
series chart of the elective courses that were taken over time.
By doing this we will be able to effectively determine the most
relevant courses and which courses should be removed from the
program.
Once we have a list of relevant electives that we want to keep
in our course roster, we can begin to look for specialties. To
accomplish this, we will try three different techniques:
association rule mining, DBSCAN clustering algorithm, and
hierarchical clustering algorithm. These three algorithms will
be examined to determine which successfully produces a strong
list of specialties to compliment the major.
II. DATA UNDERSTANDING
A. Data Collection
To begin this analysis, we will want to first look at the two
datasets that were given to use to use by the chief of the
committee. These datasets contain raw data that offer insight
into our data analysis.
 1) Current Courses Offered
The first data set provides us with a list of 42 currently
offered courses. This dataset appears to be more of a reference
table, which we will cross reference against the student
enrollment history.
In addition to 42 rows of data, this dataset also contains three
columns: Course Name, Course Number, and Course Type. The
course name represents the full name of the class. The course
number represents the id of the course such as SWENG 545.
This number is typically important to show the difficulty of the
course. In most cases, the higher the number, the more difficult
the course. The last column that we have is the course type. This
column is a categorical variable that represents whether the
course is a fundamental class, an elective, or a core course.
2) Student Enrollment Last Five Years
The second dataset provides us with 4900 rows of past
student enrollment, as well as three columns: student name,
semester new, and course name. This table provides us with all
of the different students that have enrolled in the last five years,
as well as the total number of classes they enrolled in.
From the course name column, we can cross reference them
against the course name column from our other table. This will
provide useful when determining which courses are elective,
and ultimately if the courses are even currently offered.
B. Data Description and Exploration
1) Current Courses Offered
The course list shows us that we are currently offering 42
courses. Of these courses, we have two courses that are
fundamental courses, and appropriately labeled ‘F’ in the
course type column. In addition to the fundamental courses, we
have seven core courses labeled ‘C’, and 33 courses that are
elective and labeled ‘E’.
2) Student Enrollment Last Five Years
As we have already discovered, In our second dataset we our
given three main columns. Our first column, student name,
shows us the students that have enrolled in courses over the last
five years. Our data shows that within the last five years, there
have been 448 students who enrolled in courses. Our second
column shows us that these students have taken these courses
over the span of 16 different semesters. It appears that we are
missing data from Summer 2005 since our records go from
Spring 2005 to Fall 2005. Lastly, our third column lists the 169
courses that have been taken over this span. This dataset will
later be joined together with our current course offerings. As
we can see, there have been 169 different courses enrolled in,
which differs greatly to the 42 courses that are currently offered
in the program. Many of these rows of data will be eliminated
when we combine our datasets together.
C. Data Quality
These data sets provide large amounts of meaningful data;
however, the data is full of misspellings, duplicates, and missing
data.
1) Current Courses Offered
From looking at the data table to our first dataset, we can
apply a sort function to look through the course names
alphabetically. This technique is a great way to catch
misspellings and duplicates. In this case, the data shows that we
do in fact have two courses that are the same: ARTS 571 France
and the Europ. Union and ARTS 577 France and the Europ.
Union.
Along with this duplicate course name, the data set also
appears to encounter a large variance of case discrepancies
among the course column. There are some that are listed in all
uppercase, all lowercase, and some with a mix of both. These
inconsistencies will need to be cleaned up so that we can
maintain the integrity of our dataset, and ensure that we are
providing the most accurate analysis we can.
2) Student Enrollment Last Five Years
Due to the size of this dataset, we will need to filter columns
of this data separately and apply a duplicate row filter to each
column filter so that we can look at the unique rows of this data
set. As with the last dataset, we will sort the column so that the
unique values are listed alphabetically. This will provide ease
to finding duplicates and misspellings.
When we look at the student names column, we can see that
the names appear to be all different, except for two names. The
two names in question were “Julie Christie 1995”, “Julie
Christie 1999”, “Ken Follett 2001”, and “Ken Follett 2004”.
These names will need to be combined and have the year
removed. There is also one name that also sticks out and that is
“Olympia Snow, Senator” and “Olympia Snow”. When I look
this name up in the original data table, I can see that these two
individuals are taking different classes at the same time. They
have also taken the same classes in differing semesters, which
means that we will treat these two individuals as separate
students. Also, while looking at Olympia Snow, Senator, I
noticed that her courses are duplicated. Therefore, duplicates
will also need to be removed.
Next, we will look at the semester new column. This column
appears to display 16 different semesters, all of which are
spelled correctly. There will be no need to clean this column, as
it is already looking good.
Lastly, we will analyze the course name column. We can see
through the duplicate row filter node, that when we sort the
classes, we can easily pick out all of the misspelling
discrepancies, the variances in cases, as well as even a missing
value. An example of this a misspelling is “AMERICAN
HEALT POLICY” vs “AMERICAN HEALTH POLICY”.
There are a large number of courses that have spelling
discrepancies, and therefore will need to have course names
adjusted to match each other so that we can keep the integrity
of the data in check.
III. PREPARATION
A. Data Selection
The data combined in each of these datasets will provide
useful to this analysis once cleaned. For the course listing
dataset, we will want to only look at the data for elective courses.
For the purpose of this analysis, we are looking at reducing the
number of electives as well as also defining specialties the
electives can be grouped in. To accomplish this, we will need to
make sure that we are only looking at the course type elective,
E.
The data from our second dataset, which provides historical
student enrollment for the last five years, will also need to be
filtered to only show the elective courses that are currently
offered through the university. We will need to take into account
each of the students, what semester they enrolled in their
courses, and also the course they enrolled in.
B. Clean Data
One of the most important steps in this analysis is the data
cleaning. To clean the data, we will need to look at not only
removing the spelling discrepancies, but duplicate rows,
missing data, and unifying the case. To accomplish this, we will
first start with the cell replacer node to help with spelling
discrepancies.
1) Remove Duplicate Rows from Course Offerings
To begin the cleaning journey, we will first look at the course
discrepancy in the current course offerings dataset. As
mentioned earlier, the dataset shows the course “France and the
Europ. Union” entered for both ARTS 571, and also ARTS 577.
The nominal row filter node was used to simply filter out the
course number ARTS 577. The decision to remove ARTS 577
instead of ARTS 571 makes no difference in this analysis.
Either would provide the same results. Doing this removes the
duplicate course name, which will be important when joining
the datasets together.
2) Spelling Discepancies
The cell replacer node works with two inputs and one output.
This node allows us to bring in our student enrollment history
dataset into one node, and then bring in a lookup csv file into
the other node. The second csv file was created with a lookup
column and a replace column. If a course name needs changed,
it goes into the lookup column and then what it needs to be
changed to will be entered into the replace column. To
determine what needs replaced, we can cross reference the
duplicate row filter, which we used earlier to isolate all the
unique course names taken by students, to the course names
shows in the current course offerings dataset.
After cross referencing the current course offerings dataset,
course names that needed changed were added to the lookup
column. This resulted in 53 course names that needed changed.
Our total number of course names in the student enrollment
history dataset dropped from 169 courses to 140 courses.
The same operation will have to be used for student name as
well to have “Julie Christie 1995” and “Julie Christie 1999”
changed to just “Julie Christie”. We will also have to make the
changes for “Ken Follett 2001” and “Ken Follett 2004” so that
it is just Ken Follett. By doing this we can ensure that the
student names are all different. This will drop the number of
total number of students down from 448 to 446.
3) Changing everything to uppercase.
In order to make sure all the cases are the same, and that
courses are not duplicated based on case discrepancies, we will
need to alter the cases of both datasets. To do this we will need
the case converter node, which easily allows us to select the
columns we want altered and whether we want them in
uppercase or lowercase. For the purpose of this analysis, we
will change the case on both datasets to uppercase. This will
help when joining both datasets together.
4) Duplicate Rows
The next step we need to do, is to remove the duplicates. This
was accomplished by using the duplicate row filter. After
implementing this filter, our total number of rows in the student
enrollment history dataset dropped from 4900 rows of data to
3651 rows of data.
5) Missing Values
The next step of our cleaning our data will be removing the
missing value from the student enrollment history dataset.
There is only one missing value, and it is a course name. To
eliminate this, we will use the missing value node. With this
node we can instruct the node to remove any row that has a
missing value. By performing this, we have now removed the
one row with a missing value and dropped our row total to 3650
rows.
6) Lengthen Abbreviations
The final step of cleaning will involve looking at the names
of the courses and replacing this with their full name. For
example we have a course offered called “Augustan Cultrl
Revol”. We will use a cell replacer node as before, to change
this name to Augustan Cultural Revolution.
By making this change, we will be able to better analyze this
in our model generation.
C. Integrate Data
To make this data useful, we will need to join both together.
This is easily done by using the joiner node. For this node we
will want to select the course name columns from both of the
datasets as well as the inner join option. Now that our data has
been cleaned, and all of the spellings align, we will be able to
easily perform an inner join, which joins on like values and
removes values that are not alike. This will allow us to see the
student enrollment history of only the courses that are currently
offered. Our new dataset now contains 2421 rows of data.
D. Describe Final Dataset
Our new dataset is made up of 2421 rows of data, and
contains five columns: student name, semester new, course
number, course name, and course type. When we add in our
filter for Elective Courses, we see that total row number drop
from 2421 to 746. This number means that the 292 students
have taken 746 elective courses over the past five years. Below
is a histogram showing the distribution of enrolled electives per
student.
Fig. 1. Histogram of enrolled electives per student.
Fig. 1 shows us the distribution of the number of electives
taken per student. The mean number of electives taken per
student is 2.55, given the current course listing, with most
students taking one or two elective courses.
From here we can look at what courses the students enrolled
in to see if there are courses that are more popular than others.
Fig. 2. Bar chart of elective course enrollment.
In Fig. 2, we can see that enrollment is on average below 50
students, with three classes standing out: American health
Policy, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, and Elementary Arabic
2. The mean elective course enrollment over the last five years
has been 26.6 students enrolled, with the max being 134.
This graph goes to show that some courses are more
relevant than others. Below in Fig 3, we can see the distribution
of student elective enrollment per semesters.
Fig. 3. Distribution of student enrollment per semester
In Fig. 3, we can see how many students enrolled in
electives over the last 16 semesters. On average we have seen
46.6 students enroll in elective courses each semester, with the
min falling at 13 students and the max being at 95.
E. Format Data
Now that the data is combined and correctly cleaned, we can
continue our preprocessing by adding a count column. To create
this column, we will use the math formula node. Under the
expression section of this node, we will simply enter the
number one. This will translate to a new column that we will
call dummy. This new column will contain a one in every row
and will come in handy later when we utilize certain algorithms
that will involve the creation of dummy variables and data
pivoting.
The last preprocessing step will be changing the format of
our semester new column to account for an actual point in time.
This will allow us to be able to view course enrollment over
time.
To do this, we will utilize another cell replacer node. The
adjoining csv file will take the semester new description and
replace it with a rough estimated date. For spring semesters, we
will change spring 2000 to ‘2000-01-01’, fall semesters will
change fall 2000 to ‘2000-08-01’, and for summers we will
change summer 2000 to ‘2000-05-01’. Next, we will need to
use to string to date/time node to properly convert this new
string to a date & time. Within this node we can select for this
format to just be date, which we will do. By doing this we can
successfully look at what classes’ students have taken over
time. After properly filtering out only elective courses, we can
see in fig. 4, what electives students have enrolled in over time.

Fig. 4. Elective courses taken over time
Now that our data is properly cleaned and preprocessed,
we can begin deriving models for analysis.
IV. MODEL GENERATION
Before we begin, we should remind ourselves of what we are
hoping to accomplish with model generation. For this, we have
two goals in mine:
• Determine which electives we want to keep, and
which electives we want to remove.
• Determine specialties within the electives by grouping
similar courses together.
A. Selecting Modeling Techniques
1) Data Visualizaiton
It is important to remember that there are many useful data
mining techniques. One of the most important techniques is
visualizing the data. By visualizing the data, we can make
inferences on certain characteristics and trends that we may
have missed while looking at the raw data in the dataset.
To tackle the first objective, we can simply look at Fig. 4.
Figure 4 shows us exactly which electives students have
enrolled in over time. By looking at this chart, we can determine
a trend of whether courses are relevant to students anymore.
To answer the question of which courses we should keep,
and which courses we should obsolete, we will need to make an
assumption. For this analysis we can assume that elective
courses that have not been enrolled in since the spring 2003
semester can be obsoleted. This is a fair and generous
assumption, which allows us to properly complete this
objective. Below is a list of courses that do not meet our criteria
and will thus be removed from our current elective offerings:
• ARTS 533: French Thought since 1945
• ARTS 573: Analyzing the Political World
• ARTS 571: France & The European Union
• ARTS 551: Aesthetics
• ARTS 585: Contemporary Socio Thought
• ARTS 575: Early Mesopotamian History / Society
• ARTS 565: Environmental Studies Research Seminar
Junior Level
Eliminating these seven courses will now bring our total offered
electives down to 22. The elective courses that we are going to
keep are shown below:
• ARTS 549: Freshwater Ecology
• ARTS 583: British Poetry 1660-1914
• ARTS 543: Arts and Religion
• ARTS 569: Cell Biology & Biochemistry
• ARTS 545: 20th Century Russian Literature: Fiction
and Reality
• ARTS 555: Becoming Human
• ARTS 557: 19th-Century British Literature
• ARTS 494: Business German: A Micro Perspective
• ARTS 485 Evidenced Based Crime and Justice Policy
• ARTS 492: African-American Literature
• ARTS 587: Elementary Arabic 2
• ARTS 493: American Health Policy
• ARTS 581: Comparative Politics
• ARTS 484: Europe in a Wider World
• ARTS 488: Devil’s Pact Literature / Film
• ARTS 547: Communications Internship
• ARTS 559: American South 1861-present
• ARTS 497: Contemporary Art – 1945 to present
• ARTS 491: Contemporary Political Thought
• ARTS 561: Augustan Cultural Revolution
• ARTS 495: Communications and the Presidency
• ARTS 567: Elementary German 1
Now that we have completed our first objective, we can
move onto our next. Having obsoleted elective courses, will
now shorten our list of data so that we will have less electives
to group into specializations.
2) Association Rule Mining
The first model to try out will be association rule mining.
Association rule mining is often used for retail. It helps to find
frequent itemsets based on what customers frequently buy
together. Association rule mining then breaks these frequent
itemsets into association rules , which are based on conditional
logic of if a customer buys item A then they will also buy item
B, C, and D. Association rules rely heavily on statistics to
determine if such rules are actionable or not.
By using association rule mining, we can look at the courses
that students are taking and determine whether or not we can
group these courses into frequent itemsets and potentially
association rules. By grouping these courses into frequent
itemsets, we can hopefully draw conclussions for potential
elective specializations based on what courses students tend to
take together.
3) DBSCAN Clustering Algorithm
DBSCAN stands for Density Based Spatial Clustering
Algorithm with Noise. This algorithm creates clusters based
around two parameters: EPS and MinPts. EPS determines the
radius of the clusters, while MinPts determines the minimum
number of points allowed in each cluster. This clustering
algorithm relies heavily on these parameters and is thus
sensitive to these numbers.
DBSCAN can be utilized in one of two ways:
• We can use it to analyze the data coming from what
students have enrolled in.
• We can use it to analyze the string data from the names
of the courses.
For this analysis, we will use the second option, and try to
group clusters based around similar course names. The goal is
that this will provide insight into forming clusters around
courses with similar names.
This algorithm will be the opposite of the association rule
mining algorithm. Instead of basing our clusters off the frequent
courses that students take together, we will base it off of course
names. The hope here is to form specialties around courses that
belong together, not just the courses that students enjoy taking.
4) Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm
The hierarchical clustering algorithm is an algorithm that
creates clusters by using a dendrogram. This algorithm uses a
distance type to group clusters based on their distances away
from one another. This algorithm can use four different types
of distances, or linkage methods. These include Minimum,
Average, Complete, and Ward. Based on the points within each
cluster, minimum will show the minimum distance between
points in each cluster, complete will show the maximum
distance between clusters based on the two points furthest from
each other, average will show the average distance between the
points in two clusters, while ward uses variances in a way to
show distances between to clusters.
This algorithm works well with categorical data and can be
used with strings as well. This clustering algorithm will be
based on the course names, much like the last. We will look at
the differences in the strings to create a hierarchical clustering
algorithm, with the hopes of producing significant results for
elective specializations.
5) Honorable Mentions
The above listed algorithms are believed to be the best
techniques; however, we will also include a k-means clustering
model as well as a k-medoids clustering model. Both of these
models utilize a certain number of clusters, or partitions, to
generate a clustering model. This model is then iterated
continuously until the distances between centroids / medoids
are minimized and cannot be minimized any further. K-means
and K-medoids differs in two main areas: centroids/medoids
and distance formulas.
K-means utilizes centroids which represent the center of the
cluster. This point may or not be an actual point, it is simply
just the center of the cluster. K-medoids however, uses a
medoid, which is the median point in the dataset.
The distances that are used in these two algorithms are also
very specific to the algorithm. K-means algorithm utilizes
Euclidean distances and works best with continuous. K-
medoids however, can utilize any of the distance formulas, and
works with continuous as well as categorical data.
B. Build Model
Now that we have introduced the different models and
explained why they have been selected, we will begin to
generate the models. Recall fig 4. This figure was a data
visualization that helped to answer our first objective. The data
visualization alone was enough evidence to complete our
objective, therefore, there is no model to build for this data
visualization. Instead, the first model we will look at will be the
association rule mining model.
1) Association Rule Mining Model
To create this model, we will first need to format the data in
a way that creates a column for student name, as well as a list
of courses (items) taken per student, with a final column
representing the count of courses in that list. The first step for
this is to create a dummy column, which we already
accomplished in preprocessing. Next, we will use a GroupBy
node to group the data by student. The outcome of this will be
a dataset that contains each student’s name, and then a column
that will represent a list of the courses taken. To accomplish
this, we will want to group the data by student name. After that,
we will want to use the manual aggregation column to
aggregate our data based on Course Name and the dummy
variable column. We will select Course Name and aggregate
this by List (sorted). After this is completed, we will select the
Dummy column and aggregate this by Count. This will produce
us with a column for student name, a column that is the list of
electives that the student has enrolled in, and finally a count of
how many courses are in this list. From here, we will want to
connect this node to both the Association Rule Learner
(Borgelt) node, as well as to the Item Set Finder (Borgelt).
The Association Rule Learner (Borgelt) node will provide
us with our association rule mining algorithm. Once connected,
we will want to select sorted list as our item column. This will
be our list of items that the algorithm will use to generate
association rules. From here we will want to set our minimum
set size to 3 and our minimum set support to 5.0 since we have
a large data set. We will also set our minimum rule confidence
to 20.0 and check the sorted antecedent list checkbox. From
here we are able to run our algorithm successfully and see the
association rules that we have produced.
Our other node can now be utilized as well: Item Set Finder
(Borgelt). Once this node is connected to the GroupBy node,
we can begin to configure the node. In our configuration, we
will select list (sorted) as our item column. Next we are given
the option of the algorithm: Apriori, FP Growth, RElim, SaM,
JIM, DICE, and TANIMOTO. For this we will use Apriori
algorithm. Our target type will be frequent, our minimum set
size will be 3, and our minimum support will be 1.0. We will
select to run the minimum support as percentage and not
absolute. From here we can run the algorithm and view the
results.
2) DBSCAN Clustering Algorithm
For this algorithm, we will begin by formatting the data so
that we have only the current list of offered electives. This list
will be post filtration to exclude the obsoleted course names that
we eliminated for our first objective. As stated above, this
algorithm will use the course names to cluster and find
similarities so that we can find specializations within the
elective courses.
To format this data, we will start off by using a column filter
node. Within this node, we will filter based on course number,
course name, and course type. This will eliminate the student
names from the dataset as well as the semester taken, as this
will prove to not be needed for this algorithm. Next, we will
want to use a duplicate row filter node to eliminate the duplicate
rows that resulted from removing the student name column. The
result will be a list of 22 currently offered electives. Now that
we have the data in the correct format, we will want to create
connections to both the string distances node as well as the
DBSCAN node.
Once connected to the string distances node, we can begin
configuration. To configure this node, we will need to select
course name as the column selection. This will be the column
that we use to determine distances. For the Distance selection,
we can use Levenshtein Distance, N-gram Tversky Distance
(Tanimo / Dice), Jaro – Winkler Distance. We will select the
Levenshtein Distance for this analysis. With this distance
formula we will enter one into deletion weight, one into
insertion weight, and one into exchange weight. We will also
check both normalize distances as well as uppercase input
checkboxes. This will help us to produce better distance
measurements as well as utilize the data, since it is in all
uppercase letters.
The string distance node can then be connected to the
distance port of the DBSCAN node. This will work in
conjunction with the connection from the duplicate row filter.
Now that we have the correct inputs, we can begin
configuration. To configure this, we will need to look at two
values: Epsilon and Minimum Points. As discussed earlier,
Epsilon is also known as EPS, and represents the minimum
radius of each cluster. Minimum Points will represent the
minimum number of points we want in each cluster. For
Epsilon, we will enter 0.625 and for Minimum Points we will
put in three. We will now be able to successfully run our model.
3) Hierarchical Clustering Model
Our data will need to be formatted to match the format we
used in the previous DBSCAN model. After removing the
obsolete electives, we will filter the data through the column
filter to eliminate semester new and student name columns.
After this we will continue to run the data through the duplicate
row filter. This will leave us with a list of 22 elective courses
rows and three columns: course number, course name, and
course type. Once this data has been formatted, we will want to
connect the duplicate row filter node to the string distances
node as well as the input table port of the Hierarchical Cluster
Assigner (local) node and also the data to cluster port on the
Hierarchical Clustering (DistMatrix) node.
The first node we will want to configure is the string
distances node. To configure this node, we will want our
column selection to be the course name. This will be the column
that we use to determine distances. For the Distance selection,
we can use Levenshtein Distance, N-gram Tversky Distance
(Tanimo / Dice), Jaro – Winkler Distance. As before, we will
use the Levenshtein Distance. For this algorithm, we will
configure the deletion weight to be one, the insertion weight to
be two, and the exchange weight to be four. We will then select
the normalize distances checkbox, as well as the uppercase
input checkbox. From here we will connect the output of this
node into the distance measure input port of the Hierarchical
Clustering (DistMatrix) node.
To configure the Hierarchical Clustering (DistMatrix) node,
we will need to select the linkage type as well as a checkbox for
whether we would like to ignore missing values. For this model
we will select the complete linkage type. This means that we
will utilize the maximum distance between each cluster as our
distance measure. We will also check the ignore missing values
checkbox, which will not affect our model since there are no
missing values. From here we will connect the output of this
node into the cluster tree port of the Hierarchical Cluster
Assigner (local) node.
To complete this model, we will need to configure the final
node: Hierarchical Clustering Assigner (local). This node gives
us the option to create clusters based on given number of
clusters or else a given distance threshold. For this we will
select that we want to assign clusters based on cluster count.
Form here we will select that we want to this algorithm to
generate eight different clusters. Since we have 22 different
courses that need clustered, eight clusters will allow us a
sufficient number of clusters to provide us with specializations.
We can now successfully run this model.
4) Honorable Mentions
The last two algorithms that we will look at are the k-means
and k-medoids algorithms. Both algorithms will need data to be
formatted the same way. We will want to make sure that we
have implemented our dummy variable column, which we
created in preprocessing. From here we will need to pivot our
data to create dummy variables that act as a one or zero. To
accomplish this, we will need use the pivoting node.
To configure the pivoting node, we will need to connect the
output of the math formula node into the input of the pivoting
node. To configure the pivoting node, we will need to first
select for the node to group the course name column. We will
then select for the node to pivot the student name column and
also manually aggregate the dummy column by summing. This
will give us a column of course names, and columns
representing each student with a one representing whether they
enrolled in that class. From here we will want to connect to the
missing values node.
The missing values node will help us to deal with missing
values. When we used the pivoting node, the node used the
dummy column to give a value of one to a student that enrolled
in a class. However, if the student did not enroll in a class, then
there is a “?” representing a missing value. To resolve this, we
will need to use the missing values node to change any value
that is a question mark to a 0. To do this we will configure the
missing values node under the string setting to fix any value
that is missing with a 0. We will then select under the double
selection that we replace any value that is missing with a 0.0
value. This will fix the data so that we can successfully generate
k-means and k-medoids models.
For the K-means model, we will connect the missing values
node to the K-means node. To configure this node, we will first
need to select the number of clusters to six. Next, we will set
our centroid initialization parameters to random initialization
with a random seed of one. Finally, we will include all columns
that we can in the column selection. Next, we can run this model
and send the results to a column filter node so that we only see
the course name as well as the assigned cluster. This will help
to eliminate all of the student name columns so we can easily
view the results.
For the K-medoids model, we will need to connect the
missing values node to both the k-medoids input table port, as
well as the numeric distances node. For this model we will first
begin by configuring the numeric distance node. To do this we
will select all of the columns for the column input. We will also
the distance to be Euclidean distance as well as the average
distance for missing values. The output of this node will then
link to the distance port of the k-medoids node.
The k-medoids now will be configured by first selecting the
partition count to be seven. We will then use a chunk size of
1,000, as well as set the constrain number of iterations to
10,000. Lastly, we will use a static seed of one for this model.
This will allow the experiment to be replicated.
V. MODEL EVALUATION
With all of our models successfully created, we can now
begin to interpret results and find a solution to our objectives
A. Evaluate Results
1) Data Visualization – Objective One
For our first objective, we were to successfully determine a
solution for updating our current elective courses by removing
courses that are not relevant and keeping those that are. To
accomplish this, we created a time series chart, fig. 4, that
shows which classes have been enrolled in for each semester.
By using this chart, we were able to determine which classes
are relevant and which courses are not. To determine this, we
made a conservative assumption that we will only keep on our
correct elective roster, courses that have been enrolled in since
spring semester 2003. This means that if a class has not been
enrolled in since spring of 2003, that it will be obsoleted and
removed from our current course offerings. By doing this we
have successfully eliminated seven courses, which is roughly
25% of the elective courses. We could make this assumption
and keep only courses that have been taken within the last year,
but by doing so we will remove even more classes.
It is important to understand that the goal of this objective
is to remove courses that are not relevant anymore. However,
to successfully remove these courses, we must also take into
account the repercussions.
By removing a class, we are potentially taking away a class
that a student will pay money to take. If we remove too many
classes, then we narrow the selection of courses that students
will want to take and potentially deter students from applying
for this degree program. Currently for this major, we require six
electives to be taken. This is roughly 20% of the currently
offered electives. By removing seven courses, we drop our
currently offered electives down to 22 courses. This will mean
that to complete the major requirements, students will have to
complete roughly 25% of the electives. If we continue to
remove courses, then we begin to significantly limit the
selection of electives that students are willing to take. By
removing seven courses, we are cutting the electives by roughly
25%, while also giving students a diverse enough selection of
electives that they will still be happy with.
By using this data visualization, we are successfully able to
complete our first objective.
2) Association Rule Mining – Objective Two
To analyze these results, we need to look at both the
frequent itemset node results as well as the association rule
learner node. Both nodes will provide us with results that we
will need to evaluate.
The frequent itemset node produces the following results.
Fig. 5. Frequent Itemsets Output
Fig. 5 shows us the frequent itemsets, the item set size, as
well as the itemset support, and relative itemset support. From
here we can see that these results produce large amounts of
noise. Many of these itemsets contain two or more of the same
courses. This makes it challenging to distinguish which may be
strong solutions to specializations. We can also see from the
support column that there is very little support to any of these
itemsets. The itemset with the strongest support is the itemset
containing the courses: American South 1861 – Present, 20th
Century Russian Literature: Fiction and Reality, and 19 th –
Century British Literature. This itemset however only has a
relative itemset support of only 2.098%, which is very small to
draw inferences from.
 We can continue our analysis of Association Rule Mining
by looking at the association rule learner output node. We will
want to take into account the confidence of the rule as well as
the lift. If we have a lift over one, then we can consider the rule
to be actionable. We can see below in Fig. 6 that We have
successfully generated eight association rules with varying
confidences and lifts.
Fig. 6. Association Rule Learner Output
Out of the eight association rules, we can see that they all
contain the course American health Policy. We can also see that
out of the eight association rules, only five of them are
actionable rules with a lift greater than one. The five of these
association rules have a confidence of 26.3% and lower,
making them hard to trust when setting specializations
throughout the electives.
3) DBSCAN Clustering Algorithm -Objective Two
The DBSCAN presents a different approach to selecting
specializations within the electives offered. This algorithm
takes the course names and clusters them based on their string
distances. This algorithm in particular is very sensitive to its
parameters.
The parameters we utilize in DBSCAN are Epsilon, which
is the minimum radius of the clusters, as well as Minimum
Points, which are the minimum number of points per cluster.
This algorithm was run numerous times before finding the right
values for Epsilon. It was clear that Minimum Points needed to
be three, since we are looking for clusters of three or four
courses to create specializations from. However, epsilon was
very sensitive down to the thousandths decimal place. If we had
too high of a value for epsilon, then we obtained only one
cluster. If our value of epsilon was too low, then all of our rows
were considered noise. The results below are done using an
epsilon of 0.625 as well as a minimum points setting of three.
Fig. 7. DBSCAN Output
In this output shown in fig. 7, we can see that the algorithm
created three different clusters. These clusters were Cluster 0:
• 20th Century Russian Literature: Fiction and Reality
• 19th-Century British Literature
• African-American Literature.
Cluster 1 had the following courses:
• Comparative Politics
• Contemporary Art – 1945 to Present
• Contemporary Political Thought.
Our final cluster is cluster 2:
• American Health Policy
• Communications Internship
• American South 1861 – Present
• Communications and the Presidency.
The rest of the data is shown as noise. This algorithm was
able to successfully deliver three different clusters that meet the
criteria for specializations.
The quality of these algorithms appear to vary. Cluster 0
appears to have performed well with grouping three of the four
literature courses together, thus making this a literature
specialization. Cluster 1 grouped two political courses with an
art class, however the art class does contain the word
contemporary which matches with the contemporary in
contemporary political thought. This cluster has not performed
as well as the first. Cluster 2 provides us a variety of courses
that are subject to question. Cluster 0 seems to have performed
better than cluster 1 and cluster 2.
By providing three clusters, we are offering three different
specializations within the current electives. This provides other
classes for students to take that don’t fall under a specialization
umbrella.
4) Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm – Objective Two
The hierarchical clustering algorithm shares commonalities
with the DBSCAN algorithm in the sense that it uses string
distances to create a clustering algorithm. However, the
hierarchical clustering algorithm does so in a different manner.
This algorithm has multiple parameters that effect the
performance of the model. We have to take into account
multiple string distance types, as well as our linkage style, and
the number of clusters. We produce the best results when the
Levenshtein Distance is chosen, and when we configure the
deletion weight to be one, the insertion weight to be two, and
the exchange weight to be four. For the linkage style we use
complete, with the number of clusters being eight. Tuning the
model to these settings will produce successful results that we
can draw inferences from. Below we can see in Fig. 8, that there
are eight different clusters, with five of the clusters containing
three or four courses.
 wildcard. This cluster could be labeled as arts and politics.
Cluster five provides us with four classes that are all based
around language and international affairs. This cluster can be
called international arts. Cluster six is made up of three
different courses. This cluster has performed at a much lower
level than the other four clusters.
Despite the downfall of cluster six, our model has still
provided us with four other strong specializations that make up
14 out of the 22 currently offered electives.
5) Honorary Mentions – Objective Two
The last two models that we will work with are the K-means
model and the k-medoids model. Both models performed
Fig. 8. Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm Output comparatively.
We can see that cluster two provides the following courses: We will first look at K-means clustering algorithm. We can
• Evidenced Based Crime and Justice Policy see from the output below, that this algorithm only provided us
• African-American Literature with one successful cluster of three of four classes.
• American Health Policy
• American South 1861 – Present
Next, we have cluster three which provides three courses
within its cluster:
• 20th Century Russian Literature: Fiction and Reality
• 19th Century – British Literature
• Devil’s Pact Literature / Film
In cluster four, we have three courses that are shown:
• Comparative Politics
• Communications Internship
• Communications and the Presidency
In cluster five, we have four classes that are shown:
• Business German: A Micro Perspective
• Elementary Arabic 2
• Europe in a Wider World
• Elementary German 1
The last cluster to give us enough courses for a specialty,
was cluster six, with the following three courses:
• Freshwater Ecology
• Art and Religion
• Augustan and Cultural Revolution
These five clusters have successfully grouped the courses
into groups of three and four electives, creating specializations Fig. 9. K-means Clustering algorithm output
within the elective courses. These five clusters make up 17 of
the 22 currently offered electives. We can see in fig. 9 that only cluster five provided us with
a successful cluster. The cluster contains the following courses:
When we look at performance of the model, we can see that
the model successfully grouped the courses into five clusters. • Cell Biology & Biochemistry
Cluster two provides us with a grouping of courses that we • Communications Internship
could consider to be all relevant to an American arts • Elementary Arabic 2
specialization. Cluster three provides us with three courses that
are all based around literature. This cluster we could call an arts The cluster provided by figure five is based on the courses
and literature specialization. Cluster four provides us with two that students have enrolled in. However, these courses do not
politics classes and an internship class, which acts as a appear to have much in common, except for the
communications internship acting as the wildcard which can
count for anything. From this cluster we are not able to draw
any insight from the results, thus making this algorithm
unsuccessful.
The K-medoids algorithm follows suit with another
poor performance. As we can see in the following figure, there
are no successful groupings of three or four courses.
Fig. 10. K-medoids clustering algorithm output
Despite tuning the different parameters of this algorithm,
there were no successful combinations to create a successful
and meaningful result. This model, like K-means, was
unsuccessful.
B. Analysis Limitations and Difficulties
Throughout this analysis, there have been many barriers that
were hard to navigate around. The three big areas were
clustering the courses, cleaning the data, and determining
correct approaches to objectives.
1) Course Clustering
In clustering the data, it was very difficult to find
meaningful clusters. The initial instinct was to setup association
rules so that we could see if there were concentrations that could
be inferred from the frequent itemsets. However, this proved to
provide little information as our frequent itemsets were too
similar and did not group together well.
From here we took these itemsets to be used in association
rule mining and tried to create actionable rules that could be
used. However, of the five actionable association rules we
produced, they all contained the course American Health
Policy. This made it very difficult to use this as a successful
model.
Next, the idea of using course names was used to see if a
model could generate meaningful concentrations based solely
on the course name strings. To do this we utilized two different
algorithms: DBSCAN and Hierarchical clustering algorithm.
Both of these algorithms produced successful clusters after a
time-consuming process of tuning the algorithms. These
algorithms performed well at grouping courses into groups of
two very similar courses. However, trying to get groups of three
and four courses proved to be challenging.
2) Data Cleaning
Garbage in, garbage out is the best way to look at data
cleaning. This analysis involved a lot of cleaning that occupied
much of the time allotted to this analysis. From the cleaning,
the most challenging part was interpreting student names and
course names. Many of the student names were very unique and
highly suspicious of misspellings and duplicate names. One of
the names was even an attempt at a duplicate entry. The name
in question was Olympia Snow, while the other name was
Olympia Snowe, senator. When these individuals were further
analyzed, it was discovered that they were enrolled in multiple
courses at different times and that they were in fact two unique
individuals.
Another challenging part of this was deciding how to format
the data. In order to use string clustering, assumptions had to be
made on some of the course names so that they were not
abbreviated. This was done so that the clustering algorithms
could identify those similarities. Using cell replacers to change
data was also a choice that was hard to make. However, to draw
insight from this analysis some formats needed to be changed,
such as changing the semester new column from a string to a
date value. This proved to be one of the more meaningful
changes of the experiment, as it provided a strong solution to
the first objective.
3) Correct Approaches
In this analysis, an argument can be made that there is no
one correct solution. Much like any project, data is interpreted,
a plan is set in motion, and then iterations are made based on
the continuation of data collection. For the purpose of this
experiment the conclusions that are presented are strong and are
evidence based. However, strong arguments can be made using
other algorithms which may produce similar results.
The ambiguity of the results can make an analysis like this
challenging, as there is technically no correct answer. Instead,
there is just a scientific approach, and a correct way of
conducting an experiment, analyzing the information, and
interpreting the results.
C. Conclusions
1) Objective One
 By using data visualizations, we were successful in
eliminating seven courses from our currently offered electives,
to give us a new total of 22 currently offered electives. Recall
Fig. 3. We can see that the following seven courses have not
been enrolled in the last two years.
• ARTS 533: French Thought since 1945
• ARTS 573: Analyzing the Political World
• ARTS 571: France & The European Union
• ARTS 551: Aesthetics
• ARTS 585: Contemporary Socio Thought
• ARTS 575: Early Mesopotamian History / Society
• ARTS 565: Environmental Studies Research Seminar
Junior Level
These courses have in fact not been enrolled in during the
2003, 2004, or 2005. By using this time series chart, we can
easily isolate these seven courses and determine that they
should be removed from our current course roster, thus leaving
us with the following 22 courses for students to enroll in:
• ARTS 549: Freshwater Ecology
• ARTS 583: British Poetry 1660-1914
• ARTS 543: Arts and Religion
• ARTS 569: Cell Biology & Biochemistry
• ARTS 545: 20th Century Russian Literature: Fiction
and Reality
• ARTS 555: Becoming Human
• ARTS 557: 19th-Century British Literature
• ARTS 494: Business German: A Micro Perspective
• ARTS 485 Evidenced Based Crime and Justice Policy
• ARTS 492: African-American Literature
• ARTS 587: Elementary Arabic 2
• ARTS 493: American Health Policy
• ARTS 581: Comparative Politics
• ARTS 484: Europe in a Wider World
• ARTS 488: Devil’s Pact Literature / Film
• ARTS 547: Communications Internship
• ARTS 559: American South 1861-present
• ARTS 497: Contemporary Art – 1945 to present
• ARTS 491: Contemporary Political Thought
• ARTS 561: Augustan Cultural Revolution
• ARTS 495: Communications and the Presidency
• ARTS 567: Elementary German 1
2) Objective two
For this objective we had three main algorithm models:
Association Rule Mining, DBSCAN clustering algorithm, and
Hierarchical clustering algorithm. Of these three algorithms, we
can separate them into two different methodologies.
The first of these methodologies is what association rule
mining was based around. This algorithm was used to utilize
the student course enrollment history to provide us with courses
that students frequently take and to generate actionable
association rules from this data. It wasn’t until running this
algorithm that the idea for the second methodology came to be
The second method of thinking was what DBSCAN and
Hierarchical clustering algorithm were based around. These
algorithms focused on using the unique elective course names
(post filtration of obsoleted electives from objective one) to
cluster similar courses based on string distance. When choosing
which, methodology is better, we will need to look at this from
objective in greater detail.
The second objective states that we need to determine
specializations for the elective courses based on groupings of
three to four electives. From looking at this from the college’s
point of view, these specializations should be based on courses
falling into similar concentrations of study. We should not grant
elective specializations based on what students tend to take
together. If we continue down this path, then we will be giving
out specializations in areas that are not necessarily similar.
Thus, we will follow the logic of the second methodology.
From here we can look at the performances of both DBSCAN
and the hierarchical clustering algorithm. In comparing the two,
we should look at the number of successful clusters that were
generated from each algorithm.
The DBSCAN algorithm produced three different clusters
making up ten courses in total. Two of these clusters performed
well, while the last cluster did not. This algorithm in total would
give us two successful clusters, which would result in two
different specialties within the electives.
The hierarchical clustering algorithm provided us with five
clusters comprised of 17 different courses. However, only four
of these algorithms were strong. The last algorithm provided us
with three courses that did not have any similarities. Therefore,
this algorithm successfully generated four different
specializations making up 14 of the 22 elective courses.
The hierarchical clustering algorithm provided the best
model for clustering our data into specializations. The
following are the successful cluster generated from this
algorithm, with their proposed specialization name.
American Arts and History:
• Evidenced Based Crime and Justice Policy
• African-American Literature
• American Health Policy
• American South 1861 – Present
Arts and Literature:
• 20th Century Russian Literature: Fiction and Reality
• 19th Century – British Literature
• Devil’s Pact Literature / Film
Political Arts:
• Comparative Politics
• Communications Internship
• Communications and the Presidency
International Arts:
• Business German: A Micro Perspective
 • Elementary Arabic 2
• Europe in a Wider World
• Elementary German 1 [1]
These four specializations make up just under 66% of the
elective courses, thus giving the students plenty of opportunity [2]
to complete a concentration of study.
We have provided enough evidence to support our findings. [3]
Our analysis has successfully used a time series chart to
eliminate seven electives from the current elective roster, to
[4]
give us a new total of 22 currently offered electives. We have
also successfully grouped those 22 courses into four different
groups to offer four different specializations. Moving forward, [5]
both objective proposals will be submitted to the chief of the
committee for review.
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