2009 Second International Conference on Computer and Electrical Engineering
Predicting NDUM Student’s Academic Performance Using Data Mining
Techniques
Muslihah Wook
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
muslihah@upnm.edu.my
Norshahriah Wahab
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
shahriah@upnm.edu.my
Nor Fatimah Awang
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
norfatimah@upnm.edu.my
Abstract - The ability to predict the students’ academic
performance is very important in institution
educational system. Recently some researchers have
been proposed data mining techniques for higher
education. In this paper, we compare two data mining
techniques which are: Artificial Neural Network (ANN)
and the combination of clustering and decision tree
classification techniques for predicting and classifying
students’ academic performance. The data set used in
this research is the student data of Computer Science
Department, Faculty of Science and Defence
Technology, National Defence University of Malaysia
(NDUM).
Keywords- data mining, clustering, decision tree,
artificial neural network.
I. INTRODUCTION
Data mining techniques have been applied in
many applications such as banking, fraud detection
and telecommunications [1]. Recently the data
mining methodologies were used to enhance and
evaluate the higher education tasks. Some researchers
have proposed methods and architectures using data
mining for higher education [2],[3],[4],[5]. The aim
of this research is to identify the attributes that
influence and affect the performance of
undergraduate students after their first year degree
examinations. The data set used in this research is the
978-0-7695-3925-6/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICCEE.2009.168
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Yuhanim Hani Yahaya
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
yuhanim@upnm.edu.my
Mohd Rizal Mohd Isa
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
rizal@upnm.edu.my
Hoo Yann Seong
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology
National Defence University of Malaysia, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
yannseong@upnm.edu.my
student data of Computer Science Department,
Faculty of Science and Defence Technology,
National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM).
We will compare two data mining techniques which
are: Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and the
combination of clustering and decision tree
classification techniques.
ANN technique is chosen for this research based
on the study done by [6]. The study compared three
model, ANN, decision tree and linear regression.
Students’ demographic profile and the CGPA for the
first of the undergraduate studies are used as the
predictor variable for the students’ academic
performance. The comparison results proved that the
ANN able to produce accurate results of students’
academic performance in UiTM, Shah Alam.
One of the main goals in applying the data
clustering methods was to group students in clusters
with dissimilar behavior; the students from the same
cluster embrace the closest behavior, and the ones
from different clusters have the most different one
[7]. While the decision tree classification technique
was chosen as suggested by researcher in [8],
classification is the most modeling function to be
used since it can be used to find the relationship
between a specific variable, target variable and other
variables. By combining these two techniques, we
will apply a two-phase data mining based method in
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 such a way that the result of clustering is the input to
the decision tree classification.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2
briefly describes the problem statement of this
research, section 3 describes the background of this
research, section 4 details the methodology, and
finally the conclusions and further research are
outlined.
II. PROBLEM STATEMENT
Undergraduate student’s performance is a long
standing issue in higher education and a great deal of
research over the past 75 years [9]. At the end of each
semester, students’ result will be analyzed in order to
evaluate students’ academic performance. At NDUM
the Academic Affair is responsible in managing the
examination and the results of the students. It has
been observed that most of the student’s performance
is not encouraging in which only small number of
students obtained high Grade Point Average (GPA).
The analyzed results show students are apparently
weak in certain grouping of courses which contribute
to poor GPA. Due to the scenario, tendency of
students to churn or quit from the university is high.
This situation could introduce bad image to NDUM
especially and Defence Ministry generally.
III. BACKGROUND
A. Data Mining
Gartner Group define data mining as “the process
of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns,
and trends by sifting through large amounts of data
stored in repositories and by using pattern recognition
technologies as well as statistical and mathematical
techniques.” Data mining does not intend to replace
traditional statistics. Rather, data mining is an
extension of statistics, and statistics is an integral
component in data mining [10],[11]. Data mining
actually is a combination of machine learning,
statistical analysis, modeling techniques and database
technology. Thus, data mining capable to finds
patterns and subtle relationships in data and infers
rules that allow the prediction of future results.
Meanwhile, according to [12], “data mining is the
process of automatically extracting useful
information and relationships from immense
quantities of data. In its purest form, data mining
doesn't involve looking for specific information.
Rather than starting from a question or a hypothesis,
data mining simply finds patterns that are already
present in the data.” Author in [13] said that “these
patterns are then built into data mining models and
used to predict individual behavior with high
accuracy. For example, data mining may give an
institution the information necessary to take action
before a student drops out, or to efficiently allocate
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resources with an accurate estimate of how many
students will take a particular course.”
B. Data Mining in Higher Education
Universities are one of institution that have many
data such as regarding the enrolment of students each
year, academic performance, alumni etc. Usually, the
past data has not been used since they do not realize
what the hidden values behind the data are and they
do not know how to use the data as well as why these
data are so important for the future use. Therefore,
these institutions require an important amount of
significant knowledge mined from its past and
current data sets using special methods and processes
[14]. Then, when data mining was introduced, the
application of data mining techniques was boost in
many areas such as business, telecommunication and
banking as well as educational area.
In the educational area, data mining was defined
as “the process of converting raw data from
educational systems to useful information that can be
used to inform design decisions and answer research
questions” [15]. According to [16] data mining is an
analytic approach that “capitalizes on the advances of
technology and the extreme richness of data in higher
education for improving research and decision
making through uncovering hidden trends and
patterns that lend them to predicative modeling using
a combination of explicit knowledge base,
sophisticated analytical skills and academic domain
knowledge”.
C. Students’ Academic Performance
The understanding, prediction and prevention of
the academic failure among students have long been
debated for each higher education institution. Such
study that has been done by [17] attempted to classify
students into three groups: the 'low-risk' students,
with a high probability of succeeding; the 'medium-
risk' students, who may succeed thanks to the
measures taken by the university; and the 'high-risk'
students, with a high probability of failing (or
dropping out). As consequences, the gaining results
able to classify students into three groups and
therefore the educator will able to give more attention
to the ‘high-risk’ students such as extra classes, test,
tutorial and etc. At the same time, this process
facilitates the drawing up the students’ profile based
on their academic performance and failure risk.
Another study has been conducted by [2]. They
developed a model allows the decision makers to
better predict which students are less likely to
perform well in that specific course, or those who are
less likely to be successful in it.
 IV. METHODOLOGY
In the data mining literature, various "general
frameworks" have been proposed to serve as
blueprints for how to organize the process of
gathering data, analyzing data, disseminating results,
implementing results, and monitoring improvements.
One such model, CRISP-DM (Cross-Industry
Standard Process for data mining) was proposed in
the mid-1990s by a European consortium of
companies to serve as a non-proprietary standard
process model for data mining. The CRISP-DM
methodology consists mainly of six steps:
understanding the higher education objective,
collecting the educational data, preparing the data,
building the models, evaluating the model using one
of the evaluation methods, and finally deployment
which using the model for future prediction of the
student performance. Figure 1 shows the research
framework for this study.
Figure 1. Research Framework
A. Project Understanding
The initial step is the understanding of project
domain mainly regarding to the students’ academic
performance. This area of study is very complex and
continuous processes needed to be focus on. The
exam failure among NDUM students must be
investigated, predicted and prevented in order to
obtain the high quality of students graduated from
this university. We have set our main objective is to
choose the best technique that able to be as a model
to predict students’ performance based on their
academic result. The model should be able to classify
students into groups of successful and unsuccessful
students. Therefore the knowledge that can be
extracted from this process is the patterns of
previously successful and unsuccessful students. By
identifying these students known, we are able to
decide which type of students are more successful
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than others and provide academic help for those who
are less likely to be successful.
B. Data Collection
The data used for this research is the student data
of Computer Science Department, Faculty of Science
and Defence Technology, National Defence
University of Malaysia (NDUM). This research will
focus on 85 students’ intake Sem I 2008/2009. We
use primary data in order to complement the
secondary data of the students. The primary data is
the relevant features from each of student that must
be collected using a questionnaire. The following is
a partial list of the groups of features (fields) selected
for this studies. They are:
• Demographics: age, gender, religion, race,
secondary school, home town etc.
• Education background: mode of entry
(SPM/STPM/Matriculation), previous
qualification results, MUET’s score,
computer skill, name and number of courses
taken, total credit taken, majoring, number
of course repetition etc.
• Personality: motivation of study, reading
level, learning environment and style,
interest etc.
While the secondary data is about the detail of
students’ previous results such as CPA, CGPA,
Grade Points by course type etc. that obtained from
the Academic Affair, NDUM.
C. Data Preparation
During data collection, the relevant data is
gathered and the quality of data must be verified.
Usually, the assembled data contains of missing or
incomplete attribute, noisy (containing errors, or
outlier values that deviate from expected), and
inconsistent of data are common. Therefore, the
collected data must be cleaned and transformed
before it can be utilized in data mining system since
data mining should process cleaned data in order to
come out with better and or quality results. Data
cleaning involves several of processes such as filling
in missing values; smoothing noisy data, identifying
or removing outliers, and resolving inconsistencies.
Then, the cleaned data are transformed into a form of
table that is suitable for data mining model. The
cleaned data will be divided into two; training or
learning data (60%) and the rest is for validating the
data. These training data is applied to develop the
model while the validated data is used to verify the
chosen model.
D. Modeling
As mention earlier, we proposed two techniques
which are best suited in reaching our main objectives,
 mainly neural network and combination of clustering
and decision tree techniques. The gaining results
from each of the techniques will be compared and the
best technique will be chosen as the model of this
research. The descriptions of the two techniques are
as follow:
i. Artificial Neural Network
Neural networks offer a mathematical model that
attempts to mimic the human brain [25]. Knowledge
is represented as a layered set of interconnected
nodes. The input to individual neural network nodes
must be numeric and fall in the closed interval range
from 0 to 1 [25]. Each attribute of students must be
normalized such as age must be divided by 100.
While the student’s gender and race are identified by
binary inputs. Neural network technologies such as
feed forward networks as illustrated in Figure 2
(often referred to as back propagation nets) have
demonstrated promising capability for prediction [22,
23, 24]. In attempts to predict student’s academic
performance, student’s data such as demographics,
educational background and their personality must be
considered and transformed into the required range
from 0 to 1. The input data of students from the input
layer will be calculated using the sigmoid function
then the value of the attributes will be transfer to the
hidden layer and lastly the output layer will appear
the prediction value of the student’s performance
either successful or unsuccessful profile.
Figure 2. Feed-Forward Neural Network [25]
ii. Clustering and Decision Tree
Unsupervised clustering technique can be
described as the process of organizing objects in a
database into clusters/groups such that objects within
the same cluster have a high degree of similarity,
while objects belonging to different clusters have a
high degree of dissimilarity [19]. For the clustering
process we utilized the FarthestFirst method based on
K-means algorithm. We specified the parameter k,
the number of clusters to be sought. For this theme
the k parameter was 2, corresponding to the two
groups of students we were interested in building the
successful and unsuccessful student profiles: the ones
who passed all exams and the ones who failed one or
more exams. Then k points were chosen at random as
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cluster centers. All instances were assigned to their
closest cluster center according to the ordinary
Euclidean distance metric. Next the centroid of the
instances in each cluster was calculated, and these
centroids were taken to be new center values for their
respective clusters. Finally, the whole process was
repeated with the new cluster centers. Iteration
continued until the same points were assigned to each
cluster in consecutive rounds, at which stage the
cluster centers have stabilized and would remain the
same [20].
Unfortunately, the cluster model has one
drawback; there are no explicit rules to define each
cluster. The model obtained by clustering is thus
difficult to implement, and there is no clear
understanding of how the model assigns clusters IDs
or centroid value [21]. Therefore, we propose to
employ the decision tree that may give a simpler
model of classes. A decision tree is tree-shaped
structure that represents sets of decisions. These
decisions generate rules for the classification of a
dataset. Trees develop arbitrary accuracy and use
validation data sets to avoid spurious detail [21].
They are easy to understand and modify. Moreover,
the tree representative is more explicit, easy-to-
understand rules for each cluster of student’s
performance. The classes in the decision tree are
cluster IDs obtained in the first step of the method.
The decision tree represents the knowledge in the
form of IF-THEN rules. Each rule can be created for
each path from the root to a leaf. The leaf node holds
the class prediction [21].
E. Evaluation
Before proceeding to final deployment of the
model, it is important to evaluate the model. This step
is very significant since the representative of the
model purposely is to predict the students’ academic
performance must be proven. Then, a decision on the
use of the data mining results should be reached.
Moreover, there are major challenges to cultivating
the institutional for best practices for using this
model. Therefore, the researchers are restricted to
maintaining and updating the model usage
concurrently with the associative data of students
since students data are always change for each
semester and year.
F. Deployment
As the final stage in CRISP-DM, new data sets
will be applied to the model selected in the model
building stage to generate predictions or estimates of
the expected outcome. Hence, a deployment of neural
network or combination of clustering and decision
tree model is focuses on making information and
insights available reliably to the educational
 institution. The reporting of the student’s prediction
will give a lot of benefits to students as well as the
institutional. For example, if there are high number of
students that already fail in the current semester, the
institutional should take a necessary action to prevent
the students from getting fail in the next semester
such as doing an intensive class or extra work and
exercise to the student.
V. CONCLUSION
Predicting students’ academic performance is
great concern to the higher education. Recently data
mining can be used in a higher educational system to
predict the students’ academic performance. This
research attempts to use data mining techniques to
predict and classify students’ academic performance
in NDUM. Two techniques will be compared:
Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and the
combination of clustering and decision tree
classification techniques. The technique that gives
accurate prediction and classification will be chosen
as the model for this research. Using the proposed
model, the patterns that influence or affect the
student’s academic performance will be identified.
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