Support vector classifiers are one of the most popular linear classification techniques for binary classification. Different from some commonly seen model fitting criteria in statistics, such as the ordinary least squares criterion and the maximum likelihood method, its algorithm depends on an optimization problem under constraints, which is…

The Reduced Reparameterized Unified Model (Reduced RUM) is a diagnostic classification model for educational assessment that has received considerable attention among psychometricians. However, the computational options for researchers and practitioners who wish to use the Reduced RUM in their work, but do not feel comfortable writing their own…

I-states-as-objects-analysis (ISOA) is a person-oriented methodology for studying short-term developmental stability and change in patterns of variable values. ISOA is based on longitudinal data with the same set of variables measured at all measurement occasions. A key concept is the "i-state," defined as a person's pattern of variable…

The articles in this volume indicate that typological research on college students has been around for about half a century and has a strong presence in the literature on college students. The underlying assumption in typological research is that outcomes of interests (for example, student attitudes, experiences, and outcomes) and students…

Analysts of institutional performance have occasionally used a peer grouping approach in which they compared institutions only to other institutions with similar characteristics. Because analysts historically have used cluster analysis to define peer groups (i.e., the group of comparable institutions), the author proposes and demonstrates with…

The "p"-median clustering model represents a combinatorial approach to partition data sets into disjoint, nonhierarchical groups. Object classes are constructed around "exemplars", that is, manifest objects in the data set, with the remaining instances assigned to their closest cluster centers. Effective, state-of-the-art implementations of…

Recursive partitioning methods have become popular and widely used tools for nonparametric regression and classification in many scientific fields. Especially random forests, which can deal with large numbers of predictor variables even in the presence of complex interactions, have been applied successfully in genetics, clinical medicine, and…

Community college students typically have access to a large selection of courses and programs, and therefore the student transcripts at any one college or college system tend to be very diverse. As a result, it is difficult for faculty, administrators, and researchers to understand the course-taking patterns of students in order to determine what…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

This article describes the development of a classification system to measure the expertise levels of practicing paediatric rehabilitation therapists. Seventy-five therapists from five disciplines (physical, occupational, speech-language, behaviour, and recreational therapy) were involved, along with 170 peers, and 188 parents of children with…

Describes flexible measures that relax restrictive conditional independence assumptions of latent class analysis. Dichotomous and ordered category manifest variables are viewed as discretized latent continuous variables. Discusses the relationship between the multivariate probit model proposed and the mixed Rasch model of J. Rost (1991). (SLD)

In this paper, we present a data-based user modeling framework that uses both unsupervised and supervised classification to build student models for exploratory learning environments. We apply the framework to build student models for two different learning environments and using two different data sources (logged interface and eye-tracking data).…

Shows how a theorem proven by H. Brogden (1951, 1959) can be used to estimate the allocation average (a predictor based classification of a test battery) assuming that the predictor intercorrelations and validities are known and that the predictor variables have a joint multivariate normal distribution. (SLD)

Methodological implications of a person-oriented, holistic-interactionistic perspective in research on individual development are outlined, desirable properties of a mathematical model of a phenomenon are discussed, and selected methods for carrying out person-oriented research are briefly overviewed. These methods are: (1) the classificatory…

This article introduces cluster analysis and reference set analysis as tools for understanding structure, identity, and aspiration in complex organizational fields. Cluster analysis is used to identify the structure of the organizational field in American four-year colleges and universities. The article shows that presidential choices of reference…