Roghayeh Saneifar and Mohammad Saniee Abadeh, Tarbiat Modares University, Iran

According to the increase of using data mining techniques in improving educational systems operations, Educational Data Mining has been introduced as a new and fast growing research area. Educational Data Mining aims to analyze data in educational environments in order to solve educational research problems. In this paper a new associative classification technique has been proposed to predict students final performance. Despite of several machine learning approaches such as ANNs, SVMs, etc. associative classifiers maintain interpretability along with high accuracy. In this research work, we have employed Honeybee Colony Optimization and Particle Swarm Optimization to extract association rule for student performance prediction as a multi-objective classification problem. Results indicate that the proposed swarm based algorithm outperforms well-known classification techniques on student performance prediction classification problem.

Educational data mining, bee colony optimization, continuses rule extraction, classification, particle swarm optimization