Early dropout prediction using data mining: a case study with high school students. Issue 1 (16th November 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Márquez‐Vera, Carlos; Cano, Alberto; Romero, Cristobal; Noaman, Amin Yousef Mohammad; Mousa Fardoun, Habib; Ventura, Sebastian
• Is Part Of: Expert systems. Volume 33:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 107
• Page End: 124
• Publication Date: 2015-11-16
• Subjects: predicting dropout -- classification -- educational data mining -- grammar‐based genetic programming; Expert systems (Computer science); 006.33
• DOI: 10.1111/exsy.12135
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0266-4720

Abstract

Abstract: Early prediction of school dropout is a serious problem in education, but it is not an easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are many factors that can influence student retention. On the other hand, the traditional classification approach used to solve this problem normally has to be implemented at the end of the course to gather maximum information in order to achieve the highest accuracy. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a specific classification algorithm to discover comprehensible prediction models of student dropout as soon as possible. We used data gathered from 419 high schools students in Mexico. We carried out several experiments to predict dropout at different steps of the course, to select the best indicators of dropout and to compare our proposed algorithm versus some classical and imbalanced well‐known classification algorithms. Results show that our algorithm was capable of predicting student dropout within the first 4–6 weeks of the course and trustworthy enough to be used in an early warning system.