International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science

IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

Is Alcohol Affect Higher Education Students Performance:

Searching and Predicting pattern using Data Mining
Algorithms
Saurabh Pal Vikas Chaurasia
Head, Dept. of MCA,VBS Purvanchal University, Lecturer, Dept. of MCA,VBS Purvanchal
Jaunpur, UP, India University, Jaunpur, UP, India

ABSTRACT
Chronic heavy drinking and alcoholism can have serious repercussions for the learning, and memory. Excessive drinking
among college students is associated with a variety of negative consequences that include alcohol poisoning; fatal and
nonfatal injuries; blackouts; violence, academic failure; including sexually transmitted diseases, rape and assault;
unintended pregnancy; property damage; including HIV/AIDS; criminal consequences and vocational that could
jeopardize future job prospects. The present research intends to the student achievement in Higher Education using Data
Mining techniques. This real-world data was collected by using performance reports and questionnaires which was
collected and analyzed by MCA department, VBS Purvanchal University, India. In this experimental dataset used data
set about MCA student on their courses which holds 450 instances. Four Decisions Tree algorithms (BFTree, J48,
RepTree and Simple Cart) are applied in this work. The results showed that BFTree algorithm mostly proper to classify
and predict student’s whose performance is excellent and who’s poor during studying the subjects.
Keywords: Data Mining, Questionnaires, BFTree, Drinking and Alcoholism, Chronic.

INTRODUCTION
Data mining sometimes called data or knowledge discovery in databases is the extraction of hidden predictive
information from large databases the process of analyzing data from different summarizing and perspectives it
into useful information. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among
dozens of fields in large relational databases [1].
Educational data mining (also referred to as ―EDM‖) is an area of data mining defined as the scientific inquiry
centered on the development of methods for making discoveries within the unique kinds of data that come
from educational dataset, and using those methods to better understand students and the settings which they
learn in. Prediction has two key uses within educational data mining. In this model it is important for
prediction, giving information about to predict student educational outcomes (cf. Romero et al, 2008) without
predicting mediating factors or intermediate first. In a second type of usage, prediction methods are used in
order to predict what the output value would be in contexts where it is not desirable to directly obtain a label
for that construct [2].
This paper presents a new model that enhances the Decision Tree accuracy in identifying student’s
performance. Four Decision Tree algorithms BFTree, J48, RepTree and Simple Cart are applied. The data set
consists of two Comma Separated Values (CSV) files taken from UCI Machine Learning Repository for
Students Alcohol Consumption of courses MCA students. The source data set files contained 450 instances
with 31 attributes. WEKA 3.6.9 tool is used to implement Decision Trees. In our studies 10-fold cross
validation method was used to measure the unbiased estimate of these prediction models with 66% of the
tested data.
The organization of this paper is: section two viewed the related works and listed all the models of
implementing the algorithms of data mining with education. Section three explained the concept of
Educational Data Mining (EDM) briefly. Section four listed and explained the decision trees BFTree, J48,
RepTree and Simple Cart which are implemented later in this model. Section five explained the machine
learning tool WEKA. Section six listed the decision trees model of steps and results of implementing. The
final section concludes the extraction from the whole work.

BACKGROUND
Pandey and Pal [3] conducted a study on new comer students will performer or not on the basis of student
performance selecting 600 students from different colleges of Dr.R.M.L. Awadh University, Faizabad, India.

8 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

They applied Bayes Classification on Category, Language and background qualification, in conclusion they
found that whether newcomers will perform or not.
Romero, Cristóbal, et al. [4] compared different data mining methods and techniques for classifying students
based on the final marks obtained in their respective courses. They used real data from seven model courses
with Cordoba University students. In their applied method they found that a classifier model is sufficient for
educational use has to be both accurate and comprehensible for teachers for making decisions.
Galit [5] perform a case study that uses student’s data to predict and analyze their learning behavior and to
warn students at risk before their final exams.
Osmanbegović, Edin, and Mirza Suljić [6] from University of Tuzla perform data mining techniques and
methods for comparing the prediction of students' success, applying the data collected from the surveys
conducted during the summer semester by the Faculty of Economics, academic year 2010-2011, among first
year students and investigated the result of students' achieved from high school and from the entrance exam,
and effect on success.
Pandey and Pal [7] perform a study on the student performance by selecting 60 students from a degree college
of Dr. R. M. L. Awadh University, Faizabad, India. They applied association rule for find the interest of
student in opting class teaching language.
Cortez, Paulo, and Alice Maria Gonçalves Silva [8] used data mining techniques to predict the student’s
achievement of secondary school using real-world data. The two core classes (Mathematics and Portuguese)
were modeled. Four Data Mining models (i.e. Neural Networks, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines
and Random Forest) and three input selections (e.g. without previous grades and with) were tested. The results
shows predictive accuracy can be achieved, although student achievement also depend other relevant.
Han and Kamber [9] describes data mining software that allow the users to analyze data from different
dimensions, categorize it and summarize the relationships which are identified during the mining process.
Kumar, S. Anupama, and M. N. Vijayalakshmi [10] perform a study on student’s internal assessment data to
predict their performance in the final exam. They used C4.5 decision tree algorithm. The accuracy of the
algorithm is compared with ID3 algorithm and found to be more efficient in form of the accurately predicting
the time taken to derive the tree and outcome of the student.
Bhardwaj and Pal [11] perform a study on BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) course of Dr. R. M. L.
Awadh University, Faizabad, India. The student performance based by selecting 300 students from 5 different
degree college. They used classification method on 17 attribute, and found that the factors like living location,
medium of teaching, students_ grade in senior secondary exam, students other habit, mother’s qualification,
student’s family status were highly correlated with the student academic performance and family annual
income.
Khan [12] conducted a performance study on 400 students comprising 200 boys and 200 girls selected from
the senior secondary school of Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India the aim of this research to analyze
the rate of success of students in higher secondary in science group. Cluster sampling technique was used to
analyze this study. He found that girls who had good income, education, occupation, wealth and place of
residence, got greater achievement on the other hand the boys with low living status had relatively greater
academic gain also.

EDUCATIONAL DATA MINING (EDM)

Traditional data mining methods often differ from methods from the Educational data mining. Methods from
the psychometrics literature are often integrated with methods from the machine. In recent years Educational
data mining has emerged as an independent research area, culminating in 2008 with the establishment of the
annual International Conference on Educational Data Mining, and the Journal of Educational Data Mining
[13].
There are popular methods within educational data mining. These methods are following categories:
prediction, clustering, relationship mining, discovery with models, and distillation of data for human
judgment. The prediction, clustering, relationship mining are largely acknowledged to be universal across
types of data mining and the discovery with models, and distillation of data for human judgment categories
achieve particular prominence within educational data mining.

9 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

i. Prediction
For intelligent decision making databases are rich with hidden information that can be used. Prediction is one
of the forms of data analysis that can be used to predict future data trends or to describing important data
classes from extract models. This type of analysis can help provide us with a better understanding of the large
data. There are three types of prediction: density estimation, regression, and classification. In the classification
method, the predicted variable is a binary variable or categorical variable. Some of the popular classification
methods include support vector machines, decision trees, and logistic regression. In regression, the predicted
variable is a continuous variable [14]. Some popular regression methods within educational data mining
include neural networks, support vector machine regression and linear regression. In density estimation, the
predicted variable is a probability density function. Density estimators can be based on Gaussian functions
and a variety of kernel functions. For each type of prediction, the input variables can be either continuous or
categorical; different prediction methods are more effective, depending on the type of input variables used.

ii. Clustering
The process of clustering is grouping the data into clusters or classes, so that objects within clusters have high
similarity in comparison to one another but are very dissimilar to objects in other clusters. Clustering is
particularly useful in cases where the most common categories within the data set are not known in advance.
Clusters can be created at schools or students or clustered together to search behavioral patterns or to
investigate differences and similarities in between schools. In clustering algorithm each and every data point
must contain exactly one cluster or it can postulate that it may contain no cluster or one cluster at that point
[15].

iii. Relationship mining

The relationship mining has a basic goal to find the relationships between variables, in a data set which
contain a large number of variables. This take place to find out which variables may take place most strongly
associated with a single variable of particular interest or to discover which relationships in between any two
the variables are strongest.
There are four types of relationship mining: causal data mining, association rule mining, sequential pattern
mining and correlation mining. In association rule mining, the goal is to find if-then rules of the form that
another variable will generally have a specific value if some set of variable values is found. Relationships
found through relationship mining must satisfy two criteria: interestingness and statistical significance.
Statistical significance is generally assessed through F-tests or some standard statistical tests. It is necessary to
control for obtaining relationships through chance. One method for doing this is the Bonferroni adjustment or,
such as to use post-hoc statistical methods. An alternate method is using Monte Carlo methods to assess the
overall probability of the pattern of results found. This method assesses how likely it is that the overall pattern
of results arose due to chance.
In very large data sets, it is difficult to define the significant relationships because of the numerous of
relationship may be found. For our interest measures attempt to determine which relationship are the well-
supported by the data and most separated and distinctive, in some cases also try to prune overly similar
findings [16]. There are a range of wide variety of interestingness measures, which including cosine, support,
leverage, conviction, lift, coverage, correlation and confidence. Within educational data mining (Merceron &
Yacef, 2008) lift and cosine may or may not be particularly relevant in some investigations have suggested.

iv. Discovery with Models

This model is used as a component in another analysis, such as prediction or relationship mining.
In discovery with a model, a model of a phenomenon is developed via prediction, clustering, or
knowledge engineering.
For predicting a new variable predictor variables created a model’s of predictions in the prediction case. The
current knowledge component which learned within online learning have generally depended on assessments
of the probability that the student analyses of complex constructs in gaming. These assessments of student
generally expressed as a mapping between exercises within the learning software and knowledge components,
knowledge have in turn depended on models of the knowledge components in a domain,. In the relationships
between the created model’s predictions and additional variables are studied the relationship mining case. This
10 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia
 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

can enable a researcher to study a wide variety of observable constructs and the relationship between a
complex latent construct. For instance, how much a student would game the system used predictions of
gaming the system whether state or trait factors were better predictors [17]. Generalization across contexts in
this fashion relies upon appropriate validation that the model accurately generalizes.

v. Distillation of Data for Human Judgment

Within educational data mining is the distillation of data for human judgment. The methods in this area of
educational data mining are information visualization methods – however, within EDM the visualizations is
most commonly used are often different than those most often used for other information visualization
problems, owing to the embedded within that structure, and specific structure meaning, often present in
educational data. Data is distilled for human judgment in educational data mining for two key purposes:
classification and identification. When data is distilled for identification, which are nonetheless difficult to
formally express data is displayed in ways that enable a human being to easily identify well-known patterns.
For example, one of the classic educational data mining by which visualization is the learning curve, which
displays the number of opportunities to practice a skill on the X axis, and performance on the Y axis. In this
case, sub-sections of a data set are displayed in labeled by human coders, and visual or text format. These are
the labels by which is used for the basis of the development of a predictor. This approach has been shown to
speed up the development of prediction models of complex phenomena such as gaming the system by
approximately 40 times, relative to prior methods for collecting the necessary data (Baker & de Carvalho,
2008).

METHODOLOGY
In this paper we use the following data mining methods.
i. BFTree
Best-first trees are constructed in a divide-and-conquer fashion similar to standard depth-first decision trees
[18]. The basic idea behind a best-first tree is built is as follows. Firstly, select an attribute to put at the root
node and make some branches for this attribute using some criteria. Then split training instances into subsets,
one for each branch extending from the root node. Then, this step is repeated for a chosen branch, using only
those instances that actually reach it. In each step we choose the best subset among all subsets that are
available for expansions. This constructing process continues until all nodes are pure or a specific number of
expansions is reached. Figure i.1 shows the difference in split order between a hypothetical

Fig i.1: Decision tree: a hypothetical best first decision tree.

binary best-first tree. The problem in growing best-first decision trees is now how to determine which attribute
to split on and how to split the data. Because the most important objective of decision trees is to seek accurate
and small models, we try to find pure nodes as soon as possible. To measure purity, we can use its opposite,
impurity. There are many criteria to measure node impurity. The goal is to aim an attribute to split on that can
maximally reduce impurity. When expanding nodes in the best-first tree the information and the Gini gain are
also used to determine node order. The best-first method always chooses the node for expansion whose
corresponding best split provides the best information gain or Gini gain among all unexpanded nodes in the
tree.

11 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

ii. J48
The J48 Decision tree classifier follows simple algorithm. In order to classifying for new item, it first needs to
create a decision tree which is based on the attribute values of the available training dataset. So, whenever it
encounters as a set of items (training set) it identifies the attributes that discriminates the different instances
most clearly way. For the gaining of the highest information the feature that is able to tell us most about the
data instances so that we can classify them the best is known as highest information gain. Now, in between the
possible values of this feature, if there is any other value for which there is no uncertainty of meaning, that is,
for which the data instances falling within this category have the same value for the object variable, then we
terminate that branch and assign to it the object value that we have obtained.
For the different cases, we then look forward in another attribute that gives the highest information gain.
Continuing in this manner until us either we run out of attributes, or get a clear decision of what combination
of attributes gives us a particular object value. In the event that we run out of attributes, or if we cannot get an
unambiguous result from the available information, we assign this branch a object value that the majority of
the items under this branch possess. Now we have the decision tree, we follow the order of attribute selection
as we have obtained for the tree. By checking all the relative attributes and their values with those seen in the
decision tree model, we can assign or make prediction for the target value of this new instance. In most cases,
it was seen that J48 Decision Trees perform a higher accuracy than either, Support Vector Machines or Naïve
Bayes.

iii. RepTree
REPTree builds a regression or decision tree using runes it using reduced-error pruning and information
gain/variance reduction [19]. For optimizing the speed, it only identifies numeric attributes and sorts values
for once. It deals with missing values by breaking instances into pieces. We can set the minimum number of
instances per leaf, minimum proportion of training set variance for a split (numeric classes only), maximum
tree depth (useful when boosting trees), and number of folds for pruning.

iv. Simple Cart

CART (Classification and Regression trees) incorporated a decision tree inducer for discrete classes much like
that of C4.5, which was developed independently, and a scheme for inducing regression trees. Many of the
techniques described, such as the method of the surrogate device for dealing with missing values and handling
nominal attributes, were included in CART. However, first described by Quinlan (1992) this model trees did
not appear until much more recently. The average value of the predicted attribute for the training tuples that
reach the leaf every regression tree leaf stores a prediction of continuous-valued. Since the terms numeric
prediction and regression are used synonymously in statistics, the resulting trees will be a regression trees,
although it did not use any equations of regression model. By contrast, each leaf holds a regression model in
model trees,—a multivariate linear equation for the predicted attribute. Regression as well as model trees tend
to be more accurate than linear regression when the data are not represented well by a simple linear model.

MACHINE LEARNING TOOL

Here we used WEKA 3.6.9 tool for analyzing our dataset. WEKA is a data mining system developed by the
University of Waikato in New Zealand that implements data mining algorithms. In a real-world data mining
problems WEKA is a state-of-the-art facility for developing machine learning (ML) techniques and their
applications. It is a collection of different machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks and predictions.
The algorithms are applied directly to a dataset. WEKA implements algorithms for data association,
preprocessing, classification, clustering, regression rules; it has another advantage as visualization tools. This
package of WEKA used for developing new machine learning schemes. Under the GNU General Public
License, WEKA is a open source software [20].

ALCOHOL CONSUMING STUDENT’S DATA

We have taken the attributes from primary data for secondary school student course level data from the
Portuguese student which created by Paulo Cortez and Alice Silva, University of Minho, Portugal [21]. The
data used in this study is obtained from VBS Purvanchal University students of MCA department on 31
variables from the session 2007 to 2017 having 450 instances data-sets related to the MCA course. The
12 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia
 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

attributes closed questions related to several demographic e.g. school related, family income, social/emotional
e.g. alcohol consumption and mother’s education e.g. number of past class failures variables that affect the
performance of the student [22]. All the related attributes are showing in following Table 1.

TABLE 1
Alcohol Consumption Student DATA SET
Attribute Domain
sex student's sex (binary: "F" - female or "M" - male)
age student's age (numeric: from 15 to 22)
address student's home address type (binary: "U" - urban or "R" - rural)
famsize family size (binary: "LE3" - less or equal to 3 or "GT3" - greater than 3)
Pstatus parent's cohabitation status (binary: "T" - living together or "A" - apart)
Medu mother's education (numeric: 0 - none, 1 - primary education (4th grade), 2 – 5th to 9th
grade, 3 – secondary education or 4 – higher education)
Fedu father's education (numeric: 0 - none, 1 - primary education (4th grade), 2 – 5th to 9th
grade, 3 – secondary education or 4 – higher education)
Mjob mother's job (nominal: "teacher", "health" care related, civil "services" (e.g.
administrative or police), "at_home" or "other")
Fjob father's job (nominal: "teacher", "health" care related, civil "services" (e.g.
administrative or police), "at_home" or "other")
reason reason to choose this Institution (nominal: close to "home", Institution "reputation",
"course" preference or "other")
guardian student's guardian (nominal: "mother", "father" or "other")
traveltime home to school travel time (numeric: 1 - <15 min., 2 - 15 to 30 min., 3 - 30 min. to 1
hour, or 4 - >1 hour)
studytime weekly study time (numeric: 1 - <2 hours, 2 - 2 to 5 hours, 3 - 5 to 10 hours, or 4 - >10
hours)
failures number of past class failures (numeric: n if 1<=n<3, else 4)
schoolsup extra educational support (binary: yes or no)
famsup family educational support (binary: yes or no)
paid extra paid classes within the course (binary: yes or no)
activities extra-curricular activities (binary: yes or no)
higher wants to take doctoral education (binary: yes or no)
internet Internet access at home (binary: yes or no)
romantic with a romantic relationship (binary: yes or no)
famrel quality of family relationships (numeric: from 1 - very bad to 5 - excellent)
freetime free time after school (numeric: from 1 - very low to 5 - very high)
goout going out with friends (numeric: from 1 - very low to 5 - very high)
Dalc workday alcohol consumption (numeric: from 1 - very low to 5 - very high)
Walc weekend alcohol consumption (numeric: from 1 - very low to 5 - very high)
health current health status (numeric: from 1 - very bad to 5 - very good)
absences number of institution absences (numeric: from 0 to 93)
G1 first year grade (numeric: from 1 to 3) {1. First ≥ 60% 2. Second ≥ 45 & <60% 3.
Fail< 45%}
G2 second year grade (numeric: from 1 to 3)
G3 final year grade (numeric: from 1 to 3)

The target attribute G3 has a strong correlation with attributes G2 and G1. This occurs because G3 is the
final year grade (issued at the 3rd year), while G1 and G2 correspond to the 1st and 2nd year grades. It is more
difficult to predict G3 without G2 and G1, but such prediction is much more useful.
DATA MINING MODEL

13 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

In the given survey BFTree, J48, RepTree and Simple Cart have been used to predict attributes such as school,
sex, age, failures, study time and grades (G1, G2, G3) i.e. first year grade (numeric: from 1 to 3), second year
grade (numeric: from 1 to 3), and third year grade (numeric: from 1 to 3), for chances of a student’s getting
perform or not. We have used 10 folds cross validation to minimize any bias in the process and improve the
efficiency of the process. The results show clearly that the proposed method performs well compared to other
similar methods in the literature, taking into the fact that the attributes taken for analysis are not direct
indicators of the performance of the students who is consuming alcohol during their study.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULT AND DISCUSSION

Here, we analyze Alcohol Consumption Student data set visually using different attributes and figure out the
distribution of values. Figure 1 shows the distribution of values of Alcohol Consumption Student.

Figure 2: Visualization of the Alcohol Consumption Student

The above Figure 2 visualization of Alcohol Consumption Student data set shows that there are 450 students
who studying MCA department and their final grade G3 shows 259 students are sufficient to their study, 89
students are good, 52 students are very good, 37 students are weak, 10 students are excellent and 03 students
are poor.
Classifier model is a pruned decision tree in textual form that was produced on the full training data. Here we
select Test mode:10-fold cross-validation. Table 2 shows the experimental result and figure 3 shows the
corresponding graph values. We have carried out some weka experiments in order to evaluate the performance
and usefulness of different classification algorithms for predicting student’s performance.

14 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

Table 2: Evaluation of performance of students Figure 3: Visualization of the graph value

Evaluation Classifiers 400
Criteria BFTree J48 RepTree Simple 350
300 Timing to
Cart 250
200 build model
Timing to 0.83 0.09 0.05 0.66 150
100 (in Sec)
build model 50
(in Sec) 0 Correctly

J48
BFTree

RepTree

Simple Cart
Correctly 361 352 351 354 classified
classified instances
instances
Incorrectly 89 98 99 96 Incorrectly
classified classified
instances instances
Classifiers
Accuracy 80.2222 78.2222 78 78.6667
(%)

The above table 2 indicates that from the same source the results obtained from the training data are not
optimistic compared with what might be obtained from the independent test set. In addition to the evaluation
output measurements derived from the class probabilities assigned by the tree, classification error. In a similar
way the mean absolute error calculated by using the absolute instead of squared difference. Because not all
training instances are classified correctly that is the reason the errors are not 1 or 0. Here we can show that
BFTree classifier has more accuracy than other classifiers that we used in our model. The percentage of
correctly classified instances is often called accuracy or sample accuracy of a model. Relative absolute error,
kappa statistic, mean absolute error, root mean squared error and root relative squared error will be in numeric
value only. From the following Table 3 shows the values in percentage value of relative absolute error and
relative root squared error for evaluation and Figure 4 for the reference.

Table 3: Training and Simulation Error

Evaluation Criteria Classifiers
BFTree J48 RepTree Simple Cart
Kappa statistic(KS) 0.6564 0.62 0.6205 0.63
Mean absolute 0.1001 0.0967 0.1023 0.1038
error(MAE)
Root mean squared 0.234 0.2482 0.237 0.2386
error (RMSE)
Relative absolute error 49.0446 47.4012 50.1357 50.8614
% (RAE)
Root relative squared 73.4482 77.8864 74.3877 74.8853
error % (RRSE)
Figure 4: Comparison between Parameters

0.7 80
0.6 Kappa 70
0.5 60
0.4 statistic(KS) 50
0.3 40
0.2 30 Relative
0.1 20
10 absolute error %
0 Mean absolute 0
(RAE)
J48
BFTree

RepTree

Simple Cart

J48
BFTree

RepTree

Simple Cart

error(MAE)
Root relative
squared error %
Root mean (RRSE)
squared error
(RMSE)
Classifiers Classifiers

15 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

WEKA lets allow us to see a graphical representation of the classification tree. Decision trees are a classic
supervised learning algorithms, easy to understand and easy to use. In this article we have the basic
mechanism behind decision trees and we will see the algorithm into action by using Weka. The main concept
behind decision tree learning is: we will build a predictive model which is mapped to a tree structure, starting
from the training data. The goal is to achieve perfect classification with minimal number of decision, although
not always possible due to noise or inconsistencies in data. Figure 5 and Figure 6 are the graphical
representation of the classification tree.
Figure 5: RepTree visualization

Figure 6: J48 visualization

.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, different decision tree method is used on student’s database to study the performance of students
who really need special attention during their study and will able to take appropriate steps at right time. This
empirical results show that we can produce short but accurate prediction of attributes that help the education
professionals as well as institutions to predict those students who have the worst performance; they can
develop the special techniques to improve them with special attention with confidence.
We propose an approach to predict the reasons behind the failure of the students using data mining
techniques. Four classifiers such as BFTree, J48, RepTree and Simple Cart were used for. Observation shows
that BFTree performance is having more accurate, when compared with other classification methods. The best
algorithm based on the student’s data is BFTree Classification with accuracy of 80.2222% and the total time
taken to build the model is at 0.83 seconds.

REFERENCES
1. Baker, R.S.J.d. (2007) Is Gaming the System State-or-Trait? Educational Data Mining Through the Multi-
Contextual Application of a Validated Behavioral Model. Complete On-Line Proceedings of the Workshop on
Data Mining for User Modeling at the 11th International Conference on User Modeling 2007, 76-80.

16 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia

 International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science
IJIACS
ISSN 2347 – 8616
Volume 6, Issue 4
April 2017

2. Amershi, S., Conati, C. (2006) Automatic Recognition of Learner Groups in Exploratory Learning
Environments. Proceedings of ITS 2006, 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
3. U . K. Pandey, and S. Pal, .Data Mining: A prediction of performer or underperformer using classification.,
(IJCSIT) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology, Vol. 2(2), pp.686-690,
ISSN:0975-9646, 2011.
4. Romero, Cristóbal, et al. "Data mining algorithms to classify students." Educational Data Mining 2008. 2008.
5. Galit.et.al, .Examining online learning processes based on log files analysis: a case study. Research, Reflection
and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education 2007.
6. Osmanbegović, Edin, and Mirza Suljić. "Data mining approach for predicting student performance." Economic
Review 10.1 (2012).
7. U. K. Pandey, and S. Pal, .A Data mining view on class room teaching language., (IJCSI) International Journal
of Computer Science Issue, Vol. 8, Issue 2, pp. 277-282, ISSN:1694-0814, 2011.
8. Cortez, Paulo, and Alice Maria Gonçalves Silva. "Using data mining to predict secondary school student
performance." (2008).
9. J. Han and M. Kamber, .Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques,. Morgan Kaufmann, 2000.
10. Kumar, S. Anupama, and M. N. Vijayalakshmi. "Efficiency of decision trees in predicting student’s academic
performance." First International Conference on Computer Science, Engineering and Applications, CS and IT.
Vol. 2. 2011.
11. B.K. Bharadwaj and S. Pal. Data Mining: A prediction for performance improvement using classification.,
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS), Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 136-140, 2011.
12. Z. N. Khan, .Scholastic achievement of higher secondary students in science stream., Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 84-87, 2005.
13. Baker, R.S.J.d., Corbett, A.T., Aleven, V. (2008) More Accurate Student Modeling Through Contextual
Estimation of Slip and Guess Probabilities in Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Proceedings of the 9th International
Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 406-415.
14. Barnes, T., Bitzer, D., Vouk, M. (2005) Experimental Analysis of the Q-Matrix Method in Knowledge
Discovery. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3488: Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 603-611.
15. Beck, J.E., Mostow, J. (2008). How who should practice: Using learning decomposition to evaluate the efficacy
of different types of practice for different types of students. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on
Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 353-362.
16. Cen, H., Koedinger, K., Junker, B. (2006) Learning Factors Analysis - A General Method for Cognitive Model
Evaluation and Improvement. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems,
12-19.
17. Hershkovitz, A., Nachmias, R. (2008) Developing a Log-Based Motivation Measuring Tool. Proceedings of the
First International Conference on Educational Data Mining, 226-233.
18. Frank, E. (2000). Pruning decision trees and lists. PhD thesis, The University of Waikato.
19. N. Landwehr, M. Hall, and E. Frank, ―Logistic Model Trees,‖ Machine Learning, pp. 161-205, 2005.
20. Weka Machine Learning Project, http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/index.html.
21. P. Cortez and A. Silva. Using data mining to predict secondary school student performance.[ in a. brito and j.
teixeira eds. proceedings of 5th future business technology conference ( f ubutec2008) pp:5-12 porto portugal].
2008.
22. U.K. Pandey and S. Pal, ―Mining data to find adept teachers in dealing with students,‖ International Journal of
Intelligent Systems and Applications, vol. 4(3), 2012.
23. S. Pal and V. Chaurasia, ―PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS CONSUMING ALCOHOL USING
DATA MINING TECHNIQUES‖ International Journal of Advance Research in Science & Engineering,
vol.6(02), 2017, pp. 238-250.

17 Saurabh Pal, Vikas Chaurasia