Toward Successful Management of Vocational Rehabilitation Services for People with Disabilities: A Data Mining Approach

This study proposes a multi-level data analysis approach to identify both superficial and latent relationships among variables in the data set obtained from a vocational rehabilitation (VR) services program of people with significant disabilities. At the first layer, data mining and statistical predictive models are used to extract the superficial relationships between dependent and independent variables. To supplement the findings and relationships from the analysis at the first layer, association rule mining algorithms at the second layer are employed to extract additional sets of interesting associative relationships among variables. Finally, nonlinear nonparametric canonical correlation analysis (NLCCA) along with clustering algorithm is employed to identify latent nonlinear relationships. Experimental outputs validate the usefulness of the proposed approach. In particular, the identified latent relationship indicates that disability types (i.e., physical and mental) and severity (i.e., severe, most severe, not severe) have a significant impact on the levels of self-esteem and self-confidence of people with disabilities. The identified superficial and latent relationships can be used to train education program designers and policy developers to maximize the outcomes of VR training programs.