Identifying the Mastery Concepts in Linear Algebra by Using FCM-CM Algorithm

Abstract

Euclidean distance function based fuzzy clustering algorithms can only be used to detect spherical structural clusters. Gustafson-Kessel (GK) clustering algorithm and Gath-Geva (GG) clustering algorithm were developed to detect non-spherical structural clusters by employing Mahalanobis distance in objective function, however, both of them need to add some constrains for Mahalanobis distance. In this paper, the authors’ improved Fuzzy C-Means algorithm based on common Mahalanobis distance (FCM-CM) is used to identify the mastery concepts in linear algebra, for comparing the performances with other four partition algorithms; FCM-M, GG, GK, and FCM. The result shows that FCM-CM has better performance than others.