title: An iterative procedure for extracting skill maps from data.
abstract: The methodologies for the construction of a knowledge structure mainly refer to the query to experts, the skill maps, and the data-driven approaches. This last method is of growing interest in recent literature. In this paper, an iterative procedure for building a skill map from a set of data is introduced. This procedure is based on the minimization of the distance between the knowledge structure delineated by a given skill map and the data. The accuracy of the proposed method is tested through a number of simulation studies where the amount of noise in the data is manipulated as well as the kind of structure to be reconstructed. Results show that the procedure is accurate and that its performance tends to be sufficiently stable even with high error rates. The procedure is compared to two already-existing methodologies to derive knowledge structures from a set of data. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) as a stopping criterion of the iterative reconstruction procedure is tested against the app criterion introduced by Schrepp. Moreover, two empirical applications on clinical data are reported, and their results show the applicability of the procedure.
authors.affiliation: Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padova, Italy. andrea.spoto@unipd.it.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spoto
authors.affiliation: FISPPA Department, University of Padua, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Stefanutti
authors.affiliation: Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Giulio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vidotto
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests
keywords: Conjunctive model; Data-driven construction methods; Disjunctive model; Knowledge space theory; Skill maps