A new algorithm to create balanced teams promoting more diversity

• Type: Another Publication in an International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2017

Authors

Teresa Galvão Dias (Author) FEUP; José Luís Moura Borges (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: European Journal of Engineering Education

Vol. 42

Pages: 1365-1377

ISSN: 0304-3797

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Indexing

Scopus - 3 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00M-FNH

DOI: 10.1080/03043797.2017.1296411

Abstract (EN): The problem of assigning students to teams can be described as maximising their profiles diversity within teams while minimising the differences among teams. This problem is commonly known as the maximally diverse grouping problem and it is usually formulated as maximising the sum of the pairwise distances among students within teams. We propose an alternative algorithm in which the within group heterogeneity is measured by the attributes' variance instead of by the sum of distances between group members. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by means of two real data sets and the results suggest that it induces better solutions according to two independent evaluation criteria, the Davies¿Bouldin index and the number of dominated teams. In conclusion, the results show that it is more adequate to use the attributes' variance to measure the heterogeneity of profiles within the teams and the homogeneity among teams. © 2017 SEFI.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific