An empirical study on evolutionary feature selection in intelligent tutors for learning concept detection

Concept map mining (CMM) has emerged as a new research area with recent developments in computational intelligence in educational technology. CMM includes the following steps: extracting the learning concepts from educational content, specifying relations among them, and generating a concept map as a result. The purpose of this study was to develop a mechanism using data mining technique to determine the features that characterize a learning concept extracted automatically from a single educational text. The 3 major features that distinguish the real learning concepts from other sequences of strings are detected by using a hybrid system of a feed-forward neural network and some evolutionary algorithms. Ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are used as a binary feature selection method. In addition, the aforementioned methods are hybridized to get better accuracy and precision. The performance comparisons with two different state-of-the-art algorithms have been made from the viewpoint of a typical classification problem.