An Empirical Study of the Applications of Data Mining Techniques in Higher Education

Few years ago, the information flow in education field was relatively simple and the application of technology was limited. However, as we progress into a more integrated world where technology has become an integral part of the business processes, the process of transfer of information has become more complicated. Today, one of the biggest challenges that educational institutions face is the explosive growth of educational data and to use this data to improve the quality of managerial decisions. Data mining techniques are analytical tools that can be used to extract meaningful knowledge from large data sets. This paper addresses the applications of data mining in educational institution to extract useful information from the huge data sets and providing analytical tool to view and use this information for decision making processes by taking real life examples. In modern world a huge amount of data is available which can be used effectively to produce vital information. The information achieved can be used in the field of Medical science, Education, Business, Agriculture and so on. As huge amount of data is being collected and stored in the databases, traditional statistical techniques and database management tools are no longer adequate for analyzing this huge amount of data. Data Mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) has become the area of growing significance because it helps in analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. (1) There are increasing research interests in using data mining in education. This new emerging field, called Educational Data Mining, concerns with developing methods that discover knowledge from data originating from educational environments (1). The data can be collected from various educational institutes that reside in their databases. The data can be personal or academic which can be used to understand students' behavior, to assist instructors, to improve teaching, to evaluate and improve e-learning systems , to improve curriculums and many other benefits.(1)(2) Educational data mining uses many techniques such as decision trees, neural networks, k-nearest neighbor, naive bayes, support vector machines and many others.(3) Using these techniques many kinds of knowledge can be discovered such as association rules, classifications and clustering. The discovered knowledge can be used for organization of syllabus, prediction regarding enrolment of students in a particular programme, alienation of traditional classroom teaching model, detection of unfair means used in online examination, detection of abnormal values in the result sheets of the students and so on. This paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the related work. Section III describes the research question. Section IV describes data mining techniques adopted. Section V discusses the application areas of these techniques in an educational institute. Section VI concludes the paper.