Fuzzy Inference System to Analyze Ordinal Variables - The Case of Evaluating Teaching Activity

Michele Lalla, Davide Ferrari, Tommaso Pirotti

2014

Abstract

The handling of ordinal variables presents many difficulties in both the measurements phase and the statistical data analysis. Many efforts have been made to overcome them. An alternative approach to traditional methods used to process ordinal data has been developed over the last two decades. It is based on a fuzzy inference system and is presented, here, applied to the student evaluations of teaching data collected via Internet in Modena, during the academic year 2009/10, by a questionnaire containing items with a four-point Likert scale. The scores emerging from the proposed fuzzy inference system proved to be approximately comparable to scores obtained through the practical, but questionable, procedure based on the average of the item value labels. The fuzzification using a number of membership functions smaller than the number of modalities of input variables yielded outputs that were closer to the average of the item value labels. The Center-of-Area defuzzification method showed good performances and lower dispersion around the mean of the value labels.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Lalla M., Ferrari D. and Pirotti T. (2014). Fuzzy Inference System to Analyze Ordinal Variables - The Case of Evaluating Teaching Activity . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications - Volume 1: FCTA, (IJCCI 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-053-6, pages 25-36. DOI: 10.5220/0005054400250036

in Bibtex Style

@conference{fcta14,
author={Michele Lalla and Davide Ferrari and Tommaso Pirotti},
title={Fuzzy Inference System to Analyze Ordinal Variables - The Case of Evaluating Teaching Activity},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications - Volume 1: FCTA, (IJCCI 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={25-36},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005054400250036},
isbn={978-989-758-053-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications - Volume 1: FCTA, (IJCCI 2014)
TI - Fuzzy Inference System to Analyze Ordinal Variables - The Case of Evaluating Teaching Activity
SN - 978-989-758-053-6
AU - Lalla M.
AU - Ferrari D.
AU - Pirotti T.
PY - 2014
SP - 25
EP - 36
DO - 10.5220/0005054400250036