Estimation of Relationships Between Field of Research and Classes by Using Semi-Supervised NMF

Abstract

The goal of this study is to visualize the relationships between classes and specialty (i.e., laboratory) for supporting students to determine the classes with the future direction of study. The students choose their classes by themselves because the university curriculum is highly flexible. Each class should be connected to some specialties though, it is difficult for students to understand the relationships from just syllabus without sufficient knowledge.This paper proposes a method to estimate the relationships between classes and laboratories in the faculty. The proposed method applies semi-supervised non-negative matrix factorization to reveal the common factors of knowledge in each combination of laboratory and class. It was suggested that reasonable results for the relationship between the laboratory and classes were calculated by the proposed method. We believe that it is possible for students to understand which class should relate to which laboratory