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Palestine Technical University Research Journal

Abstract

Data mining is an important field; it has been widely used in different domains. Oneof the fields that make use of data mining is Educational Data Mining. In this study, we apply machine learning models on data obtained from Palestine Technical University-Kadoorie (PTUK) in Tulkarm for students in the department of computer engineering and applied computing. Students in both fields study the same major courses; C++ and Java. Therefore, we focused on these courses to predict student’s performance. The goal of our study is predicting students’ performance measured by (GPA) in the major. There are many techniques that are used in the educational data mining field. We applied three models on the obtained data which have been commonly used in the educational data mining field; the decision tree with information gain measure, the decision tree with Gini index measure, and the naive Bayes model. We used these models inour work because they are efficient and they have a high speed in data classification, and prediction. The results suggest that the decision tree with information gain measure outperforms other models with 0.66 accuracy. We had a deeper look on key features that we train our models; precisely, their branch of study at school, field of study in the university, and whether or not the students have a scholarship. These features have an influence on the pre-diction. For example, the accuracy of the decision tree with information gain measure increases to 0.71 when applied on the subset of students who studied in the scientific branch at high school. This study is important for both the students and the higher management of PTUK. The university will be able to do some predictions on the performance of the students. In the carried experiments, the prediction of the model was in line with the actual expectation.

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