The prediction of students' academic performance using classification data mining techniques

Data Mining provides powerful techniques for various fields including education. The research in the educational field is rapidly increasing due to the massive amount of students’ data which can be used to discover valuable pattern pertaining students’ learning behaviour. This paper proposes a framework for predicting students’ academic performance of first year bachelor students in Computer Science course. The data were collected from 8 year period intakes from July 2006/2007 until July 2013/2014 that contains the students’ demographics, previous academic records, and family background information. Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, and Rule Based classification techniques are applied to the students’ data in order to produce the best students’ academic performance prediction model. The experiment result shows the Rule Based is a best model among the other techniques by receiving the highest accuracy value of 71.3%. The extracted knowledge from prediction model will be used to identify and profile the student to determine the students’ level of success in the first semester.