Educational data mining using cluster analysis and decision tree technique: A case study

In recent years, research on Educational Data Mining (EDM) has developed rapidly. However, most researches focus on data source issues, and ignore the importance of data preprocessing and data mining algorithms. This paper has studied EDM, with a special focus on educational big data mining algorithms. Firstly, it analyzed the relevant elements of EDM and introduces big data technology based on the requirements of educational data application. Then it introduced the common educational big data mining algorithms and their applications, and finally discussed the development trend of educational big data mining algorithms.

This study focuses on predicting which firms will increase capital by issuing new stocks in the near future. Many stakeholders, including banks, credit rating agencies and investors, performs a variety of analyses for firms' growth, profitability, stability, activity, productivity, etc., and regularly report the firms' financial analysis indices. In the paper, we develop predictive models for rights issues using these financial analysis indices and data mining techniques. This study approaches to building the predictive models from the perspective of two different analyses. The first is the analysis period. We divide the analysis period into before and after the IMF financial crisis, and examine whether there is the difference between the two periods. The second is the prediction time. In order to predict when firms increase capital by issuing new stocks, the prediction time is categorized as one year, two years and three years later. Therefore Total six prediction models are developed and analyzed. In this paper, we employ the decision tree technique to build the prediction models for rights issues. The decision tree is the most widely used prediction method which builds decision trees to label or categorize cases into a set of known classes. In contrast to neural networks, logistic regression and SVM, decision tree techniques are well suited for high-dimensional applications and have strong explanation capabilities. There are well-known decision tree induction algorithms such as CHAID, CART, QUEST, C5.0, etc. Among them, we use C5.0 algorithm which is the most recently developed algorithm and yields performance better than other algorithms. We obtained data for the rights issue and financial analysis from TS2000 of Korea Listed Companies Association. A record of financial analysis data is consisted of 89 variables which include 9 growth indices, 30 profitability indices, 23 stability indices, 6 activity indices and 8 productivity indices. For the model building and test, we used 10,925 financial analysis data of total 658 listed firms. PASW Modeler 13 was used to build C5.0 decision trees for the six prediction models. Total 84 variables among financial analysis data are selected as the input variables of each model, and the rights issue status (issued or not issued) is defined as the output variable. To develop prediction models using C5.0 node (Node Options: Output type = Rule set, Use boosting = false, Cross-validate = false, Mode = Simple, Favor = Generality), we used 60% of data for model building and 40% of data for model test. The results of experimental analysis show that the prediction accuracies of data after the IMF financial crisis (59.04% to 60.43%) are about 10 percent higher than ones before IMF financial crisis (68.78% to 71.41%). These results indicate that since the IMF financial crisis, the reliability of financial analysis indices has increased and the firm intention of rights issue has been more obvious. The experiment results also show that the stability-related indices have a major impact on conducting rights issue in the case of short-term prediction. On the other hand, the long-term prediction of conducting rights issue is affected by financial analysis indices on profitability, stability, activity and productivity. All the prediction models include the industry code as one of significant variables. This means that companies in different types of industries show their different types of patterns for rights issue. We conclude that it is desirable for stakeholders to take into account stability-related indices and more various financial analysis indices for short-term prediction and long-term prediction, respectively. The current study has several limitations. First, we need to compare the differences in accuracy by using different data mining techniques such as neural networks, logistic regression and SVM. Second, we are required to develop and to evaluate new prediction models including variables which research in the theory of capital structure has mentioned about the relevance to rights issue.

This paper brings in an insight of the number of ways the students’ performance can be predicted. The performance of a student plays a vital role in any institution. It is the measure for assessing the academic excellence of any esteemed educational body. Not only the institute but the academic performance matters to the student as well. There is a tough competition in the field of academics. Students spend their sleepless nights turning up the pages of their books. Well, amidst of this, a student tussle with many hardships. At present, there are various methodologies to predict the student's performance and Data mining provides the most scientific and dependable method for predicting the same. Educational data mining is the process behind the evaluation of useful patterns out of huge education databases. These patterns help the educators in predicting the performance of the student. In a way it also helps in advancing effective teaching. Data mining techniques can be useful in culling out the data concerted to specific needs. This paper presents the study to find out the gap in the existing performance prediction methodologies.

Education can be utilized as a tool to face many problems, overcome many hurdles in life. The knowledge obtained from education helps to enhance opportunities in one's employment development. To extract useful information from the knowledge obtained, Educational Data Mining is widely used. Educational data mining provides the process of applying different data mining tools and techniques to analyze and visualize the data of an institution (school) and can be used to discover a unique pattern of students' academic performance and behavior. The present work intends to enhance students' academic performance in secondary school using data mining techniques. Real data was collected using school reports and questionnaire method by the Portugal school which has been used in this paper. Naive Bayesian algorithm can be easily implemented to predict the students' academic performance and behavior. Classification of students into two classes, pass and fail, involves training phase and testing phase. In training phase, Naive Bayes classifier is built and in the testing phase, Naive Bayes classifier is used to make the prediction. The accuracy of the classifier is calculated using WEKA tool in which confusion matrix is generated. The accuracy of the classifier obtained is 87% which can be further improved by the selection of appropriate attributes. Developing the classification algorithms in this way helps to obtain a more efficient student performance predictor tool using other data mining algorithms and it also helps to improve the quality of education in an educational institution.

The way we learn has changed as a result of advances in science and technology and the growing influence of information technology on daily life. E-learning is a relatively new concept in educational settings, but it has progressively earned a spot in modern training techniques. Data mining methods are used in many applications, particularly in elearning. Comparing direct communications difficult to track the student involvement in online courses. To overcome the above mentioned issues the existing methods are analyzed various techniques of data mining and optimization methods which can be applied to bring out hidden knowledge from the educational data? In the e-learning work, preprocessing, feature selection and classification process are performed to improve the Kalboard 360 educational dataset accuracy significantly. This study focused on educational data mining (EDM) and employed decision trees, support vector machines (SVM), multilayer perceptrons, and the naive bayesian C4.5 algorithm among other classification techniques to assess the features for the prediction of students’ behaviour and academic achievement. This paper analyzes the advantages and shortcomings of each algorithm applied to data set on the basis of accuracy for various classification techniques like Multilayer Perceptron based ANN algorithm (MP-ANN), Decision Tree (DT) C4.5 and Hybrid Regression model with Multi Label Classification (HR-MLC) approach. The experimental result shows that the HR-MLC algorithm provides better performance in terms of higher accuracy, precision, recall and f-measure rather than the other existing methods.

Educational data mining (EDM) is an up-coming interdisciplinary research field, in which data mining (DM) techniques applying in educational data. Its objective is to better understand how students gain knowledge and recognize the settings in which they learn to improve educational outcomes. Educational systems can store a huge amount of data that coming from multiple sources in different formats. Each particular educational problem requires different types of the mining techniques because traditional DM techniques cannot be applied directly to these types of data and problems. There are many general data mining tools are available but these are not designed for deal with educational data and an educator cannot use these tools without knowledge of data mining concepts. To overcome from this problem many authors provided educational data mining tools with different data mining techniques for different purposes. This paper surveys the EDM Tools from 2001 to 2016 and presents the consolidated list of tools in one place to help the EDM researchers. Then categorizes the tools based on data mining methods and explains the usage of EDM Tools.

Due to the growing interest in data mining and the educational system, educational data mining is the emerging topic for research community. The various techniques of data mining like classification and clustering can be applied to bring out hidden knowledge from the educational data. Web video mining is retrieving the content using data mining techniques from World Wide Web. There are two approaches for web video mining using traditional image processing (signal processing) and metadata based approach. In this paper, we focus on the education data mining and precisely MOOCs which constitute a new modality of e-learning and clustering techniques. We present a methodology that can be used for mining Moocs videos using metadata as leading contribution for knowledge discovery.

Human resource is one of the functions of a company that is considered as an asset. Therefo re, the theory of performance qualificat ion was adopted by the company in order to get an overview of employee performance. Furthermore, the company needs an effective method to predict the performance not only for the employees but also for the new applic ants. The goals of this research are to get a decision tree model of the employee performance. By learning employee data, the performance of the new applicants could be predicted. The study would provide the characteristic of new applicants who will give better performance than other applicants . The data from a company in Indonesia will have been used for this research. The data mining technique will be applied to the data of operators (such as admins, clerks, cashiers, machine operators, and security offi cers). The data mining technique was use d is decision tree. The decision tree technique was commonly used for a supervised learning data. The decision tree technique also has advantages compared others, because of its ability to produce information that is easy to understand. The result of this research shown the high dependency of employee performance with employment type (work contract). It also means that employees are encouraged to provide good performance to the company if those employees have become p ermanent employees. This research also showed that there is no relationship between employee performances with gender or position grade.

The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being 'information rich' yet 'knowledge poor'. There is a wealth of data available within the healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. Knowledge discovery and data mining have found numerous applications in business and scientific domain. Valuable knowledge can be discovered from application of data mining techniques in healthcare system. In this study, we briefly examine the potential use of classification based data mining techniques such as Rule based, Decision tree, Naive Bayes and Artificial Neural Network to massive volume of healthcare data. The healthcare industry collects huge amounts of healthcare data which, unfortunately, are not "mined" to discover hidden information. For data preprocessing and effective decision making One Dependency Augmented Naive Bayes classifier (ODANB) and naive credal classifier 2 (NCC2) are used. This is an extension of naive Bayes to imprecise probabilities that aims at delivering robust classifications also when dealing with small or incomplete data sets. Discovery of hidden patterns and relationships often goes unexploited. Using medical profiles such as age, sex, blood pressure and blood sugar it can predict the likelihood of patients getting a heart disease. It enables significant knowledge, e.g. patterns, relationships between medical factors related to heart disease, to be established.

The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being ‘information rich’ yet ‘knowledge poor’. There is a wealth of data available within the healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. Knowledge discovery and data mining have found numerous applications in business and scientific domain. Valuable knowledge can be discovered from application of data mining techniques in healthcare system. In this study, we briefly examine the potential use of classification based data mining techniques such as Rule based, decision tree and Artificial Neural Network to massive volume of healthcare data. In particular we consider a case study using classification techniques on a medical data set of diabetic patients.

By maximising the greatest results and decreasing the number of students who fail, educational institutions aim to improve the quality of education. Improving and developing academic achievement requires the ability to accurately estimate student performance in advance. Using data mining techniques, educational institutions can get valuable insights from the study of educational data. The purpose of this research is to present educational data mining approaches and incorporate them into a web-based platform for forecasting low-performing pupils. Prediction models were compared in a comparative study. High-performance models were then designed to get better results. Hybrid RF, a hybrid random forest algorithm, is the most effective at classifying data. In order to enhance the learning outcomes and intervention methods, a new feature selection approach called MICHI is presented, which is the mixture of similarity measure and chi-square techniques based on ranking feature scores. Using the suggested methodologies for educational data mining, a system for predicting student academic performance will be constructed for academic entrepreneurs to obtain an early forecast of student achievement for prompt treatment. Experiments and surveys demonstrate the utility and efficacy of the academic prediction system that was built. Use of the system aids educators in intervening and enhancing student outcomes.

Educational data mining (EDM) evaluates and predicts students' performance that assists to discover important factors affecting students' academic performance and also guides educational managers to make appropriate decisions accordingly. The most common technique for discovering meaningful information from the educational database is classification. The accuracy of classification algorithms on educational data can be increased by applying feature selection algorithms. Feature selection algorithms help in selecting robots and meaningful features for predicting students' performance with high accuracy. This paper presents different EDM approaches for forecasting students' performance using different data mining techniques. In addition, this paper also presents an evaluation of recent classification algorithms and feature selection algorithms used in educational data mining. Furthermore, the paper will guide the researchers on new and possible dimensions in building a prediction model in EDM.

The Technology has an increasing impact on all areas of life, including the education sector, and requires developing countries to emulate developed countries and integrate technology into their education systems. Recently schools in Libya are facing an issue trying to figure out why students perform poorly in certain subjects and how can they know how they will perform next in the future in coming semesters in perspective subject. There are several methods proposed to predict the student’s performance, using data mining techniques. In this paper, there are plans to create Data Mining Techniques in Education (i.e., DME) prediction model clustering, classification and association rule mining in many universities and schools in order to provide students and teachers with the most advanced platform. Although relatively late, the Libyan government finally responded to this challenge by investing heavily in rebuilding the education system and launching a national plan to presented method in terms of predicting students’ performance based on their grades in Math and English. The results are divided in to three main sections clustering analysis using k-mean algorithm, classification analysis was done using two rounds first using Gain Ratio Evaluations to find out the top attributes that used by J84 algorithm in second round of classification, and rule association analysis using A priori algorithm. Rule association analysis is applied for the clusters generate by clustering analysis to generate the rules associated with each cluster. For each section, a list of inputs is presented with the scale used for the values followed by the results of the algorithm and explanation for the finding.

Evolutionary Computing for Educational Data Mining is a research field which with the applications of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to mine, analyze and modify educational data. This paper presents the most relevant studies conducted in this research area. The paper also describes different EAs used for implementing different data mining techniques. It goes on to list how these algorithms are utilized by different educational users to carry out different tasks. Finally, a new combination of EA, Educational User and data mining technique is suggested for implementation. As a part of that a personalized courseware construction technique is proposed and a sample courseware is constructed using the proposed technique. The details about the rule construction and the data mining process involved in the courseware construction techniques are also explained.

Data mining is one of the most important steps of the knowledge discovery in databases process and is considered as significant subfield in knowledge management. Research in data mining continues growing in business and in learning organization over coming decades. This review paper explores the applications of data mining techniques which have been developed to support knowledge management process. The journal articles indexed in ScienceDirect Database from 2007 to 2012 are analyzed and classified. The discussion on the findings is divided into 4 topics: (i) knowledge resource; (ii) knowledge types and/or knowledge datasets; (iii) data mining tasks; and (iv) data mining techniques and applications used in knowledge management. The article first briefly describes the definition of data mining and data mining functionality. Then the knowledge management rationale and major knowledge management tools integrated in knowledge management cycle are described. Finally, the applications of data mining techniques in the process of knowledge management are summarized and discussed.