[Databionic-ESOM-User] Beginner needs help with data preprocessing

[Peter S. <pet...@ig...>]

Hi everyone

 

I am *very new* to Emergent Self-Organizing Maps.

 

My area of reseach encompasses school absenteeism. I have a year of
attendance data for several thousand students on a class-by-class basis. The
data looks like this (five classes per day):

 

Student#   Week      Mon  Tue  Wed  Thu  Fri

1234       2/2/09     ***** ****T ***** EEEEE *****

           9/2/09     ***** JJJ** ***** L**LL *****

           16/2/09    ***** ***** ***SS ***** *****

           ...etc          

9876       2/2/09     ***** MMMMM ***** ***** *****

           9/2/09     ***** ***** ***** ***** QQQQQ

           16/2/09    DDD** ***** ***** ***** *****

           ...etc          

 

An asterisk indicates that the student is present. Letter codes indicate the
type of absence: D (Doctor/Dentist), E (Explained but unjustified), J
(Justified), L (present but Late), M (Medical), Q (school trip or camp), T
(Truant).

 

I intend coding the attendances/absences into:

-Present

-Late

-Justified (eg other school activity)

-Justified but questionable (eg note from home stating student is unwell)

-Unjustified (E and T)

 

I want to examine a number of hypotheses about relationships between
individual students' attendance patterns early in the year, and later on.

 

My supervisor has asked me to investigate whether ESOMs will be a useful
analytical tool in my research. I have downloaded and installed the
Databionic ESOM Tools.

 

I'm having trouble figuring out how to preprocess my data into a format
suitable for use with the software. 

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

MTIA

 

Peter Sim

New Zealand