PredictingSchoolFailureUsing：预测失败的学校使用.pdfVIP

Predicting School Failure Using Data Mining C. MÁRQUEZ-VERA Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico C. ROMERO AND S. VENTURA University of Cordoba, Spain ________________________________________________________________________ This paper proposes to apply data mining techniques to predict school failure. We have used real data about 670 middle-school students from Zacatecas, México. Several experiments have been carried out in an attempt to improve accuracy in the prediction of final student performance and, specifically, of which students might fail. In the first experiment the best 15 attributes has been selected. Then two different approaches have been applied in order to resolve the problem of classifying unbalanced data by rebalancing data and using cost sensitive classification. The outcomes of each one of these approaches using the 10 classification algorithms and 10 fold- cross validation are shown and compared in order to select the best approach to our problem. Key Words and Phrases: School failure, Educational Data Mining, Prediction, Classification. _________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION Recent years have shown a growing interest and concern in many countries about the problem of school failure and the determination of its main contributing factors. This problem is known as the “the one hundred factors problem” and a great deal of research has been done on identifying the factors that affect the low performance of students (school failure and dropout) at different educational levels (primary, secondary and higher) (Araque et al., 2009). A very promising solution to resolve this problem is the use of Data Mining (DM) that is called Educational Data Mining (EDM) when applied to an educational context (Romero and Ventura, 2010). Th