Clustering of faculty by evaluating their appraisal performance by using feed forward neural network approach

Abstract

Clustering is the process of grouping a set of data objects into multiple groups or clusters with high similarities and dissimilarities. Dissimilarities and Similarities are assessed on the attribute values describing the objects and often involve distance measures. Clustering acts as a data mining tool by having its roots in many application areas such as biology, security, business intelligence, web search etc. Our Institute is currently using a software application with a name-Merit System, which evaluates the performance of the staff members regarding their level of teaching by considering various factors. It computes the performance level by collecting feedback from every student. It gives the appraisal result in the form of 30 points earned to every staff member. It acts as a tool for the management of our college to gauge the performance level of the teacher which in turn helps them in assessing annual increments and other promotions. The main drawback of this system is its inability in grouping of staff members like Group-A, Group-B, Group-C etc. Because, many of the staff members have scored the performance points in the range of 21 to 30 which will creates lot of ambiguities to the management to make clusters of staff members to these groups. This issue is the prime concern of this paper and it was given with an approach to solve this problem by considering possible optimum soft computing technique that includes Feed Forward Neural Network approach.