BIA ASSIGNMENT

BATCH: 2018-2020

SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO:

AMAN KUMAR PROF. SUBHRANSHU
MOHANTY

ARMY INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT & TECHNOLOGY,

GREATER NOIDA (UP) – 201306
 APPLICATION OF DATA MINING IN EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Educational Data Mining (EDM) describes a research field concerned with the application of
data mining, machine learning and statistics to information generated from educational
settings (e.g., universities and intelligent tutoring systems). EDM refers to techniques and
tools designed for automatically extracting meaning from large repositories of data generated
by peoples learning activities in educational settings At a high level, the field seeks to
develop and improve methods for exploring this data, which often has multiple levels of
meaningful hierarchy, in order to discover new insights about how people learn in the context
of such settings In doing so, EDM has contributed to theories of learning investigated by
researchers in educational psychology and the learning sciences. The field is closely tied to
that of learning analytics, and the two have been compared and contrasted. Quite often, this
data is extensive, fine-grained, and precise. The main objective of applying Data Mining to
educational data is to analyse educational Data contents, models, to summarize/analyse the
learner’s discussions, etc. Education Data Mining concentrates on the computing process
models which focus on Education context. In educational system, a student’s performance is
determined by the term work, attendance and end semester examination. The term work is
carried out by the teacher based upon student's performance in educational activities such as
class test, assignments, attendance. The end semester examination is one that is scored by the
student in semester examination. Student must get minimum marks to pass a semester in
internal as well as end semester examination.
Calders & Pechenizkiy (2011) associate basic EDM tasks to traditional data mining
problems, i.e.:
Classic DM Educational Example
Problems
Classification Categorizing and profiling students, determining their learning styles
and preferences.
Predictive Inducing models that can predict whether (and when) a student will
Modelling pass a course or not or will eventually graduate or drop out.
Clustering Grouping Similar students (based on behaviour, performance, etc) or
grouping similar courses, assignments etc together, exploring
collaborative learning patterns.
Bi-Clustering Finding which questions (tasks, courses etc) are difficult/easy for
which students.
Frequent Pattern Finding (elective) courses often taken together or popular paths in
Mining study programs or actions in LMS
Emerging Pattern Finding patterns that capture significant differences in behaviour of
Mining students who graduated vs. those students who did not or that explain
the changes in behaviour of student generations over different years.
Collaborative Recommending suitable learning objects, based on the analysis of the
filtering and performance of other learners, recommending remedial classes for the
recommendations students.
Visual Analytics Facilitating reasoning about the educational processes or learning
results via interactive data/model visualization, e.g. Visualizing
collaborations of students.
 APPLICATIONS OF DATA MINING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
List of the primary applications of EDM is provided by Cristobal Romero and Sebastian
Ventura. In their taxonomy, the areas of EDM application are:

 Analysis and visualization of data

 Providing feedback for supporting instructors
 Recommendations for students
 Predicting student performance
 Student modelling
 Detecting undesirable student behaviours
 Grouping students
 Social network analysis
 Developing concept maps
 Constructing courseware
 Planning and scheduling
There are many application areas of data mining like customer analytics, Agriculture,
banking, Security Applications, Educational data mining, Mass surveillance, Privacy
preserving etc. The main concerned area is about data mining applications in educational
systems. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an emerging discipline, concerned with
developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational
settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they
learn in. A key area of EDM is mining student’s performance. Another key area is mining
enrolment data. Key uses of EDM include predicting student performance and studying
learning in order to recommend improvements to current educational practice. EDM can be
considered one of the learning sciences, as well as an area of data mining. The main
applications of EDM are listed as follows:

A. Analysis and Visualization of Data

It is used to highlight useful information and support decision making. In the
educational environment, for example, it can help educators and course administrators
to analyse the students’ course activities and usage information to get a general view
of a student’s learning. Statistics and visualization information are the two main
techniques that have been most widely used for this task. Statistics is a mathematical
science concerning the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and
presentation of data. It is relatively easy to get basic descriptive statistics from
statistical software, such as SPSS. Statistical analysis of educational data (logs
files/databases) can tell us things such as where students enter and exit, the most
popular pages students browse, number of downloads of e-learning resources, number
of different pages browsed and total time for browsing different pages. It also
provides knowledge about usage summaries and reports on weekly and monthly user
 trends, amount of material students might go through and the order in which students
study topics, patterns of studying activity, timing and sequencing of events, and the
content analysis of students notes and summaries. Statistical analysis is also very
useful to obtain reports assessing how many minutes student worked, number of
problems here solved and his correct percentage along with our prediction about his
score and performance level. Visualization uses graphic techniques to help people to
understand and analyse data. There are several studies oriented toward visualizing
different educational data such as patterns of annual, seasonal, daily and hourly user
behaviour on online forums. Some of such investigations are statistical graphs to
analyse assignments complement, questions admitted, exam score, student tracking
data to analyse student’s attendance, results on assignments and quizzes, weekly
information regarding students and group’s activities.

B. Predicting Student Performance

In this case, we estimate the unknown value of a variable that describes the student. In
education, the values normally predicted are student’s performance, their knowledge,
score, or marks. This value can be numerical/continuous (regression task) or
categorical/discrete (classification task). Regression analysis is used to find relation
between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. Classification is
used to group individual items based upon quantitative characteristics inherent in the
items or on training set of previously labelled items. Prediction of a student’s
performance is the most popular applications of DM in education. Different
techniques and models are applied like neural networks, Bayesian networks, rule-
based systems, regression, and correlation analysis to analyse educational data. This
analysis helps us to predict student’s performance i.e. to predict about his success in a
course and to predict about his final grade based on features extracted from logged
data. Different types of rule-based systems have been applied to predict student’s
performance (mark prediction) in an eLearning environment (using fuzzy-association
rules).Several regression techniques are used to predict student’s marks like linear
regression for predicting student’s academic performance, stepwise linear regression
for predicting time to be spent on a learning page, multiple linear regression for
identifying variables that could predict success in colleges courses and for predicting
exam results in distance education courses.

C. Grouping Students
In this case groups of students are created according to their customized features,
personal characteristics, etc. These clusters/groups of students can be used by the
instructor/developer to build a personalized learning system which can promote
effective group learning. The DM techniques used in this task are classification and
clustering. Different clustering algorithms that are used to group students are
hierarchical agglomerative clustering, K-means and model-based clustering. A
clustering algorithm is based on large generalized sequences which help to find
groups of students with similar learning characteristics like hierarchical clustering
algorithm which are used in intelligent e-learning systems to group students according
to their individual learning style preferences.
D. Enrolment Management
This term is frequently used in higher education to describe well-planned strategies
and tactics to shape the enrolment of an institution and meet established goals.
Enrolment management is an organizational concept and a systematic set of activities
designed to enable educational institutions to exert more influence over their student
enrolments. Such practices often include marketing, admission policies, retention
programs, and financial aid awarding. Strategies and tactics are informed by
collection, analysis, and use of data to project successful outcomes. Activities that
produce measurable improvements in yields are continued and/or expanded, while
those activities that do not are discontinued or restructured. Competitive efforts to
recruit students are a common emphasis of enrolment managers. The numbers of
universities and colleges instituting offices of "enrolment management" have
increased in recent years. These offices serve to provide direction and coordination of
efforts of multiple offices such as admissions, financial aid, registration, and other
student services. Often these offices are part of an enrolment management division.
Some of the typical aims of enrolment management include
 Improving yields at inquiry, application, and enrolment stages.
 Increasing net revenue, usually by improving the proportion of entering
students capable of paying most or all unsubsidized tuition.
 Increasing demographic diversity.
 Improving retention rates.
 Increasing applicant pools.

TECHNIQUES OF EDUCATIONAL DATA MINING

A. Clustering Algorithm
Clustering is a division of data into groups of similar objects. Clustering plays an
outstanding role in data mining applications such as information retrieval and text
mining, scientific data exploration, web analysis, spatial database applications,
medical diagnostics, marketing and many more.
Data Clustering is unsupervised and statistical data analysis technique. It is used to
classify the same data into a homogeneous group of primary school students it is used
to operate on a large dataset to discover hidden pattern and relationship helps to make
decision quickly and efficiently. Cluster analysis is used to break down a large set of
data into subsets called clusters. Each cluster is a collection of data objects that are
like one another. They are placed within the same cluster but are dissimilar to objects
in other clusters. Following algorithms are used in education mining in Clustering.

B. K-Mean Clustering Algorithm

The K-means is one of the best clustering algorithms in data mining. K-Means is a
non-hierarchical clustering method that seeks to partition the data into the form of one
or more clusters .This method partitions the data into clusters so that the data having
 the same characteristics are grouped into one cluster and the data that have different
characteristics grouped into another cluster.
K-Means Clustering (KMC) proposes to partition n objects into k clusters in which
each object belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean. Exactly k different clusters
have been produced by this method with greatest possible characteristic. Initially best
number of clusters k leading to the greatest separation (distance) is not known and
must be computed from the data. K-Means clustering’s objective is to minimize the
squared error function or total intracluster variance.
Let X = {x1,x2,x3,……..,xn} be the set of data points and V = {v1,v2,…….,vc} be
the set of centres.
1) Randomly select ‘c’ cluster centres.
2) Calculate the distance between each data point and cluster centres.
3) Assign the data point to the cluster centre whose distance from the cluster centre is
minimum of all the cluster centres.
4) Recalculate the new cluster centre using:

Where, ‘ci’ represents the number of data points in ith cluster.

5) Recalculate the distance between each data point and new obtained cluster centres.
6) If no data point was reassigned then stop, otherwise repeat from step 3).

C. Classification
Classification is the form of data analysis that extracts models describing important
data classes. This approach frequently uses decision tree classification algorithms.
The data classification process includes learning and classification. In learning
method, the training data sets are analysed by the classification algorithm. In
classification test data sets are used to find the accuracy of the classification rules. If
the accuracy is acceptable the rules can be applied to the new data tuples.

D. ID3 Algorithm
Terminologies used in ID3 Algorithm:
 Establish Classification Attribute.
 Compute Classification Entropy.
 Calculate Information Gain using classification attribute.
 Select Attribute with the highest gain to be the next Node in the tree (starting
from the Root node).
 Remove Node Attribute, creating reduced table.

E. Dimensionality reduction techniques

The dimensionality reduction is the utmost vital method to eliminate redundant
attributes and noise which can be further classified into feature extraction and
assortment method. The student clusters are generated from the well-known
COBWEB algorithm. The student clusters are formed based on the credits obtained
from the given semester. As stated before, the grouping utility is defined as the
weighted distance utility of the attribute (i.e. credits).To mine the students’
performance data, the data mining classification techniques such as – Decision tree
Random Tree and J48 classification models were built with 10 cross validation fold
using WEKA.