2014 Fourth International Conference on Advanced Computing & Communication Technologies
Mining Students Data for Performance Prediction
Tripti Mishra Dr. Dharminder Kumar
Research Scholar Professor &Chairman, CSE Department
Mewar University G.J. University, Hisar
mishratripti2007@gmail.com dr_dk_kumar_02@yahoo.com
Abstract-A countrys growth is strongly measured by
quality of its education system. Education sector, across
the globe has witnessed sea change in its functioning.
Today it is recognized as an industry and like any other
industry it is facing challenges, the major challenges of
higher education being decrease in students success
rate and their leaving a course without completion. An
early prediction of students failure may help the
management provide timely counseling as well coaching
to increase success rate and student retention. We use
different classification techniques to build performance
prediction model based on students social integration,
academic integration, and various emotional skills
which have not been considered so far. Two algorithms
J48 (Implementation of C4.5) and Random Tree have
been applied to the records of MCA students of colleges
affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha
University to predict third semester performance.
Random Tree is found to be more accurate in
predicting performance than J48 algorithm.
Keywords- classification, data mining, prediction,
I. INTRODUCTION
Preliminary education adds to a nations literacy rate
but higher education has a direct impact on the work
force being provided to the industry and hence
directly affects the economy.
Lots of Institutions of higher learning have been set
up across India. However the quality of education is
judged by the success rate of students and to what
extent an institute is capable of retaining its students.
Predicting students performance can help identify
the students who are at risk of failure and thus
management can provide timely help and take
essential steps to coach the students to improve his
performance.
Data mining techniques have been applied to predict
the academic performance of the students based on
their socio economic condition and previous
academic performances. This paper explores the link
between emotional skills of the students along with
978-1-4799-4910-6/14 $31.00 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ACCT.2014.105
Dr. Sangeeta Gupta
Professor, Management and IT
Bhagwan Parushram Institute of
Technology, Delhi
sangeet_gju@yahoo.com
socio economic and previous academic performance
parameters to predict academic performance using
data mining techniques. The emotional skills like
assertion, leadership, stress management etc are
obtained, using standard Emotional Skill assessment
process ESAP.
Data mining tasks can be either descriptive or
predictive. Descriptive data mining uses techniques
of association rule mining, clustering etc. to find
patterns hidden in large data set and help in
intelligent decision making. Predictive data mining
constructs models using rule set, decision tree,
neural nets, and support vectors etc. to predict the
class of a new data set.
The objective of this paper is to predict the third
semester performance of MCA students. The
rationale behind considering third semester for
prediction is the observation that most of the
students drop out of the course after first year and
also students normally take a year to get integrated
in an institute academic environment. Two decision
tree algorithms, J48 and Random Tree, have been
used to build the model and the main contribution of
this paper is the model comparison along with
finding the impact of various attributes on
students performance.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 discusses previous work followed by
experimental settings in section 3.Section 4 presents
the result and conclusions are discussed in section 5.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Most cited literature survey papers in Educational
data Ming have been by Romero and Ventura [4],
Ryan Baker [16], and Romero and Ventura [5] which
indicate performance prediction as one of the
emerging field of educational data mining. Paris,
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Affendy and Musthphain [9] have used various
subject performance attributes to predict final CGPA
of bachelor of computer science students of a
Malaysian University. Various Bayesians
Classification techniques have been used and a
comparative study suggests that Ensemble method
gives best overall accuracy.
Nghe, Janice and Haddawy [17] have considered two
diverse populations, international, large Can Thao
University of Vietnam and Asian Institute of
Technology a small international postgraduate
institute and achieved similar levels of accuracy of
prediction performance for both the population.
Cheewaprakobkit [14] considered 1600 students
records bet 2001 and 2011 in Thailand University
and applies decision tree and neural network to most
important factors affecting students academic
achievement. Decision tree proves to be a better
classifier than the neural network with 1.31% more
accuracy. Number of hours worked per semester,
additional English course, no of credits enrolled per
semester and marital status of the students are major
factors affecting the performance.
Importance of 24 predictor variables including
demography, scores in maths , Turkish, religion and
ethics, science and technology and level
determination exams etc have been ranked by
Sen, Uar, and Delen [1] for predicting Turkish
secondary education placement result. Application of
Artificial Neural Network, Support Vector Machine,
Multiple Regression and Decision indicated that most
important predictor variables are determination exam,
scholarship, number of siblings, success level in
Turkish Language etc.
Wook et al.[11] have considered few personality
traits like motivation of study, interests, learning
environment , along with demographic details and
previous academic performance to predict CGPA of
computer science graduate and finally find out
students who at risk of failing.
Bidgoli, Koshy, Kortemeyer and Punch [3 ] applied
tree classifier as well as non tree classifiers to predict
the grades of students enrolled with online education
Latest Learning Online Network with Computer
Assisted Personalized Approach (LON CA PA)
developed at Michigan State University and found
that combination of multiple classifier enhanced the
prediction accuracy.
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Osmanbegovic and Suljic in [7] have considered
students attitude towards studying apart from
demographic variables and score earned at high
school to predict the grade in Business Information
for first year students. Score of entrance exam, study
material and average weekly hours devoted to
studying have been found to have maximum impact
while number of household member distance of
residence and gender have been found to have least
impact. Nave Bayes is found to be better classifier
than J48.
Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector
(CHAID) has been used by Ramaswami and
Bhaskaran in [10] to classify 12th class students of
select Tamilnadu schools. Apart from demographic
details, students health, tuition, care of study at
home etc. have been studied. Prediction Accuracy
obtained was 44.69, and potential influences
variables were found to be Xth grade marks, location
of school, private tuition etc.
Bharadwaj and Pal [2] base their experiment only on
Previous Semester marks, class test grade, seminar
performance, Assignment, attendance, Lab work to
predict end semester marks. Records of 50 students
of Session 2007 to 2010 MCA of Purvanchal
University were considered. The paper calculates
Split info, gain ratio of each predictor and products
prediction rules.
N. S. Shah [13] has applied various algorithms of
decisions tree (C45 Random Forest, BF Tree, Rep
Tree),Functions ( logistic RBF Network) ,Rule (3
Rip) and Bayes Net, Naive Bayes to categorize
students of BBA program of University of Karanchi.
Out of 42 independent variable 5 best variables
having highest effect in determining performance is
considered. Random Forest proven to most accurate
classifier J48 decision tree, BF Tree ,Rep Tree and J
Rip rule .
Kabakchieva in [6] conducts data mining
classification Techniques on 10330 students, with 14
attributes including personal profile, secondary
educational score, entrance exam score, admission
year etc. The students are classified into five
categories excellent, very good, good, average and
bad. 10 fold cross validation and percentage split is
used for all the classifier J48, Bayesian, K-nearest
neighbor one R and J Rip.J48 has been found to be
most suitable of all classifiers.
Kabra and Bichkar [15] experimented with 346 first
year students of an engineering college collecting
their demographic data (category, gender etc), past
performance data (SSC or 10th marks, HSC or 10 + 2
exam marks etc.), address and contact number to
predict whether a student will PASS/FAIL or get
promoted(When he fails in 3 theory and 2 practical
subjects). J48 algorithm in WEKA produces a
prediction model with accuracy 60.46 %. The most
important attribute in predicting students
performance is found to be HSCCET. The social
attributes like category, parents occupation, living
III. EXPERIMENTAL SETTING
The major objective of the proposed methodology is
to build the classification model that classifies a
students third semester performance as BAVG
(<60%), AVG (60% to less than 70%) , ABVG (70%
to less than79%) and EXCL (>=80%) . The
classifiers, has been built by combining the Standard
Process for Data Mining that includes business
understanding, data understanding, data preparation,
modeling and finally application of data mining
techniques which is classification in present study.
A. Data Understanding
The data of MCA students from various Institutions
affiliated to GGSIP University was collected through
a structured questionnaire. A sample of 250 students
was collected having 25 attributes which included
academic integration, social integration and
emotional skills as shown in Table I.
B. Data-Preprocessing
The data collected was saved as Excel spread sheets.
The cleaning process required data eliminating data
with missing values, correcting inconsistent data,
identifying outliers, as well as removing duplicate
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location and other attributes like gender, medium at
secondary level are found to be less relevant
The students dropping out of an open polytechnic of
New Zealand due to failure has been explored by
Kovaic.Z [18].Enrollment data consisting of socio-
demographic variables (age, gender, ethnicity,
education, work status, and disability) and study
environment (course programme and course block),
of 435 students of polytechnic students of
Information system course were collected. The final
label consisting of two categories PASS (those who
completed the course) and FAIL (Those who did not
complete) were considered. Feature selection
indicated that most important attributes for prediction
are ethnicity, course programme and course block.
data. Data source from the total of 250 instances in
the raw data, the data cleaning process ended up in
215 instances.
C. Modeling
The open source data mining tool Waikato
Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), has
been used for classification. WEKA provides inbuilt
algorithms that can be applied to any data set.
D. Classification
Tree-based methods classify instances by sorting the
instances down the tree from the root to some leaf
node, which provides the classification of a particular
instance. Each node in the tree specifies a test of
some attribute of the instance and each branch
descending from that node corresponds to one of the
possible values for this attribute [16]. J48 is a class
for generating a pruned or unpruned C4.5 decision
tree while Random Tree constructs a tree that
considers K randomly chosen attributes at each node
without pruning. We have used Cross-validation for
testing as it has been proved to be more suitable for
limited dataset and gives best estimate of error [10].
 TABLE I. Attributes Description

Attribute Name Values Description

GENDER Male, Female Gender
FE Midschool, Inter, Grad, Postgrad Fathers Education
ME Midschool, Inter, Grad, Postgrad Mothers Education
FO Govtjob, Pvtjob, Business Fathers Occupation
MO Govtjob, Pvtjob, Business ,Housewife Mothers Occupation
FI MIG,HIG,LIG,VHIG Annual Family Income
LOAN Yes, No Educational loan at any level of education
EARLYLIFE Metro, City, Village 15 years of life spent
MEDIUM English, Other Medium of instruction at school level.
TENTH BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in 10th
TWELVTH BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in 12th
GRAD BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in Graduation
FIRST_SEM BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in 1st Semester of MCA
SECSEM BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in 2nd Semester of MCA
THIRDSEM BLAVG, AVG, ABAVG, EXCL % marks in 3rd Semester of MCA
GRADDEGTYPE Regular, Distance Type of Graduation Degree
GRADDEGSTREAM CS, NCS Graduation Degree Stream
GAPYEAR Yes, No Gap year in education
ACADEMICHRS INSUF, SUF, OPTIMAL Hours spent on academic activities
ASSERTION D, S,E* Assertiveness of the student
EMPATHY D, S,E Empathy of the student
DECISIONMAKING D, S,E Decision making ability of the student
LEADERSHIP D, S,E Leadership ability of the student
DRIVE D, S,E Drive of the student

STRESSMGMT D, S,E Stress management skill of the student

*D, S , E represent need to develop, need to strengthen ,need to enhance respectively

D. Classification

Tree-based methods classify instances by sorting the
instances down the tree from the root to some leaf
node, which provides the classification of a particular
instance. Each node in the tree specifies a test of
some attribute of the instance and each branch
descending from that node corresponds to one of the
possible values for this attribute [12]. J48 is a class
IV.
J48 and Random tree were applied on the data set
using 10 fold cross validation. The summary and the
rules obtained by J48 are listed in Fig. 1 and Table II,
for generating a pruned or unpruned C4.5 decision
tree while Random Tree constructs a tree that
considers K randomly chosen attributes at each node
without pruning. We have used Cross-validation for
testing as it has been proved to be more suitable for
limited dataset and gives best estimate of error [8].
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
while summary of random tree and rules are shown in
Fig .2 and Table III. The performance of algorithms
is evaluated on the basis of recall and precision and
true positive(TP) rate. Precision is defined as number

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of correct positive prediction over total number of
positive prediction and recall is defined as number of
correct positive prediction over total number of
positive cases. A high precision indicates that
algorithm returns more relevant results than
irrelevant and high recall means that most of the
results retuned by the algorithm are relevant. The
performance comparison of J48 and Random Tree is
shown in Table IV.

Figure 1. J48 Result Summary

TABLE II. Rules Derived from J48

1. If(SECSEM = AVG)and (TWELFTH = AVG)and(MEDIUM = English)and(EARLYLIFE = Metro)and(ME = Grad): ABAVG

2. If(SECSEM = AVG)and (TWELFTH = AVG)and(MEDIUM = English)and (EARLYLIFE = City)and (GRAD = AVG): AVG)
3. If(SECSEM = AVG)and( TWELFTH = EXCL): AVG
4. If(SECSEM = AVG)and (TWELFTH = ABAVG): AVG
5. If(SECSEM = AVG)and (TWELFTH = BAVG)and (LEADERSHIP = S)and (GRAD = BAVG): BAVG
6. If(SECSEM = AVG)and (TWELFTH = BAVG)and (LEADERSHIP =E): AVG
7. If(SECSEM = EXCL)and (GRADDEGTYPE = Regular): EXCL
8. If(SECSEM = ABAVG)and (FIRSTSEM = ABAVG)and(TENTH = ABVG): ABAVG
9. If(SECSEM = BAVG)and (ME = Inter): BAVG

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 Figure 2. Random Tree Result Summary

TABLE III. Rules Derived from J48

1. If(SECSEM = BAVG)and(ASSERTION = D)and(FI = MIG) : BAVG

2. If(SECSEM = ABAVG) and (LEADERSHIP = E ): ABAVG

3. If(SECSEM = EXCL)and (FE = Grad) : EXCL /0)

4. If(SECSEM = AVG)and(FO = Govtjob)and(ACADEMICHRS = SUF)and(DRIVE = S) : AVG

TABLE IV. Performance Comparison of J48 and Random decision Tree

J48 Random Tree

TP Precision Recall TP Rate Precision Recall
Rate
ABVG 0.792 0.924 0.792 0.948 0.924 0.948
EXCL 1.000 0.857 1.000 0.952 0.952 0.952
AVG 0.900 0.851 0.900 0.914 0.970 0.914
BAVG 0.923 0.923 0.923 1.000 0.929 1.000
Weighted Average 0.884 0.887 0.884 0.944 0.945 0.944
Correctly Classified 88.3721% 94.4186%
Instances
Incorrectly Classified 11.627% 5.5814%
Instances

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It is evident from the rules derived from the J48 and
Random tree that
x Result of second semester is key influencer of
third semester result. It is expected also, as the
programming subjects of second semester forms
the foundation of programming subjects of third
semester.
x Consistently good academic performance is
clearly a good indication of good performance in
third semester too.
x Out of all emotional attributes leadership and
drive of the students have been found to affect
the performance.
x Socio economic conditions are having only
marginal effect on performance.
The performance of both the algorithm is
satisfactory; however, higher overall accuracy
(94.418%) was attained by Random Tree
implementation as compared to J48 with 88.372%
accuracy. Also the True Positive Rate, Precision and
Recall measures of Random tree are higher than J48
and in line with the corresponding accuracy.

V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

DIRECTIONS

Today academic success of students of any

professional Institution has become the major issue
for the management. An early prediction of students
at risk of poor performance helps the management
take timely action to improve their performance
through extra coaching and counseling. This paper
focused on identifying attributes that influenced
students third semester performance. Effect of
emotional quotient parameters on placement has been
established. Random tree gave higher accuracy of
prediction than J 48.The future research direction will
include professional courses of B.Tech as well as the
development of a decision support system to help
authorities identify the weak students and take timely
measures.

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