Grey relational analysis and radial basis function network for determining costs in learning sequences

There is a competence set consisting of ideas, knowledge, information, and skills for solving a decision problem. In order to effectively acquire the needed skills in the competence set to solve the problem, finding appropriate learning sequences of the needed skills for decision makers should be taken into account. However, how to determine the learning cost of learning one skill to another skill plays a critical role for generating learning sequences. For this, the paper aims to propose an effective method to estimate the learning cost between any two skills by using the grey relational analysis and a radial basis function network. A computer simulation with an integer programming method is employed to demonstrate that it is possible to facilitate the acquisition of single skills by considering a set of useful compound skills. This indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.