Educational Data Mining 2009
Abstract. The monitoring and support of university freshmen is considered very
important at many educational institutions. In this paper we describe the results
of the educational data mining case study aimed at predicting the Electrical
Engineering (EE) students drop out after the first semester of their studies or
even before they enter the study program as well as identifying success-factors
specific to the EE program. Our experimental results show that rather simple
and intuitive classifiers (decision trees) give a useful result with accuracies
between 75 and 80%. Besides, we demonstrate the usefulness of cost-sensitive
learning and thorough analysis of misclassifications, and show a few ways of
further prediction improvement without having to collect additional data about
the students.