Identifying Non-Performing Students in Higher Educational Institutions Using Data Mining Techniques

The educational institutes are focusing on improving the performance of students by using several data mining techniques. Since there is an increase in the number of drop out students every year, if we are able to predict whether a student will complete the course or not, it is possible to take some preventive actions beforehand. The primary data set used for modelling has been taken from a reputed technical institute of Uttar Pradesh which consists of data of 6,807 students containing 20 academic and non-academic attributes. The most relevant attributes are extracted using CorrelationAttributeEval (in WEKA) technique using Ranker search method which ranks the attributes as per their evaluation. Synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) filter is applied to deal with the skewed data set. The models are built from eight classifiers that are analysed for predicting the most appropriate model to classify whether a student will complete the course or withdraw his/her admission.