keyboard_arrow_up
Efficiency of Decision Trees in Predicting Student's Academic Performance

Authors

S. Anupama Kumar1 and Vijayalakshmi M.N2, 1PRIST University, India and 1,2 R.V.College of Engineering, India

Abstract

Educational data mining is used to study the data available in the educational field and bring out the hidden knowledge from it. Classification methods like decision trees, rule mining, Bayesian network etc can be applied on the educational data for predicting the students behavior, performance in examination etc. This prediction will help the tutors to identify the weak students and help them to score better marks. The C4.5 decision tree algorithm is applied on student’s internal assessment data to predict their performance in the final exam. The outcome of the decision tree predicted the number of students who are likely to fail or pass. The result is given to the tutor and steps were taken to improve the performance of the students who were predicted to fail. After the declaration of the results in the final examination the marks obtained by the students are fed into the system and the results were analyzed. The comparative analysis of the results states that the prediction has helped the weaker students to improve and brought out betterment in the result. To analyse the accuracy of the algorithm, it is compared with ID3 algorithm and found to be more efficient in terms of the accurately predicting the outcome of the student and time taken to derive the tree.

Keywords

Assessment, Prediction, Educational data mining, Decision tree, C4.5algorithm, ID3 algorithm

Full Text  Volume 1, Number 2