2019 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Communication Engineering (ECCE), 7-9 February, 2019

Identification of Drop Out Students Using

Educational Data Mining
Nafisa Tasnim Mahit Kumar Paul A. H. M. Sarowar Sattar
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology
Rajshahi, Bangladesh Rajshahi, Bangladesh Rajshahi, Bangladesh
nafisa.ruetcse16@gmail.com mahit.cse@gmail.com sarowar@gmail.com

Abstract—Education makes a human being steady, stable and
prosperous in his way of leading life. In the same way, the number
of higher educated persons in a country can contribute to the
development of the country. However, this number decreases
due to dropout of students at early stage of the education.
Furthermore, if a student can’t continue or drop out, the
resources of a nation is attenuated. Although nowadays the rate
of drop out students is diminishing, till now it is a huge challenge
for an educational institution to identify the dropout students at
the beginning. To address this issue, several approaches have
been discussed in educational data mining to identify the rate of
drop out students. Following this line in this paper, a threshold
based approach has been proposed to identify dropout students
that outperforms than the existing approaches.
Index Terms—Educational Data Mining, threshold, classifica-
tion, drop out, important features.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Education is the important factor for succeeding a long
term improvement in any sector of a country. It enlightens
the individual and develops his/her capability to the limit. The
main purpose of the education system is to build up each
and every student’s skills and knowledge needed to reach the
successful career pathway. This is the main target of most of
the educational institutions. But the task is a huge challenge
because a large amount of students drops out every year due
to various reasons. A vast resource is being wasted due to the
dropping out of students. It pulls down the nation backward.
As the rate of drop out students’ increases, the economic
growth and development of a nation decreases. It’s very
difficult for the educational institutions to analyze and find out
the key reasons behind the dropping out of students by looking
after each and every student. It’s a costly procedure and needs
a lot of manpower. In this case, data mining techniques can
be used to predict the students who are at risk of dropout.
Data mining aims at discovering previously unknown, po-
tentially useful and non-trivial knowledge from a huge amount
of data [1]. Data mining techniques have both predictive and
descriptive natures. Usually, supervised learning methods have
predictive nature and unsupervised learning methods have
descriptive nature [2]. By using the predictive nature of data
mining techniques, one can identify the students who are at
risk of drop out. In supervised learning method both input
and target class are given and an algorithm is used to learn
the function so that one can easily predict the target variable
when a new input is given. In this paper, a threshold value
based approach has been presented where the threshold value
is calculated by using the attributes of the datasets and their
corresponding information gain value. By using the threshold
value it can easily be identified whether the students are at
risk of dropping out.
The leavings of the paper is systematized as follows: in
section II, the related tasks by many researchers have been
discussed. Proposed method has been described in section
III. In section IV, a brief introduction to the datasets and
the metrics for performance analysis has been given. The
performance of the proposed approach is analyzed in section
V. And in section VI, the conclusion of our work has been
provided.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Identification of drop out students is a major task because
without educating people building up a developed country
is not possible. For this, the educational department and the
government of a country are aware of this. Researchers have
tried to invent new models for identifying students who are at
risk of dropping out. Predictive, Descriptive and also Subgroup
Discovery algorithms have been utilized in this field to identify
drop out students and the key factors which are responsible for
drop out students. P. Cortez and A. Silva have implemented
different types of predictive and descriptive model and tried
to compare among them [3]. In [4], A. Tamhane, S. Ikbal, B.
Sengupta, M. Duggirala and J. Appleton have reported on a
large-scale study and used several classification algorithms for
identifying the risk students such as Decision Tree, Decision
Table, Logistic Regression, and Naive Bayes. In a recent
work [5] the authors have tried to find out who, when and
why are at risk of not graduating on time. They have used
Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Stepwise Regression, and
Cox Regression model for their way of task. In another
work [6], the authors have proposed new evaluation metrics
to measure the goodness of machine learning algorithms
from the view of an educator’s. In this paper, the authors
have used different classification algorithm. They are Random
Forest, AdaBoost, Linear Regression, Support Vector Machine,
Decision Tree. Some traditional evaluation metrics such as

978-1-5386-9111-3/19/$31.00 © 2019 IEEE

ROC curves, precision and recall have been used for evaluating
the model. They have identified heavily used features by using
Information Gain and Gini Index. Jaccard Similarity metrics
have been used for evaluating various algorithms. In 2017,
D. B. Fernandez and S. Lujan-Mora have used three data
mining tools (RapidMiner, Knime and Weka) for this task
[7]. Some well-known machine learning techniques such as
Random Forests, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees etc. have
been used by them to predict the performance of students [9]–
[12].
Subgroup discovery is a significant data mining technique
which has been largely used in educational data mining. The
subgroup discovery technique discovers interesting associa-
tions among different variable [8]. Using this technique, the
authors have identified key factors by using the methods SNS,
DSSD, NMEEF-SD, BSD, SD-Map and Apriori-SD [13].
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
In this paper, to predict about the drop out students, we
have proposed a novel approach based on threshold value
calculation. Threshold values are calculated using important
features. These features are selected using Information Gain
[14]. The more is the information gain, the feature is more
important. According to the information gain, we have taken
some features to calculate the threshold value.
For calculating the threshold value we have considered two
properties of the dataset attributes: increasing and decreasing
factors. Increasing factor refers to the ability of an attribute
to increase the probability of a student being graduated. For
example, if the students’ previous class test marks is better,
then we can assume that s/he will do better or can continue
the study. On the other hand, decreasing factor is vice versa
of increasing factor that decreases the probability of a student
being graduated. For example, if the absence rate of a student
is higher, then the probability of drop out is also higher. Let,
we have considered a feature. Then the feature values are
splitted in two portions. In a portion, the lower values are
included and in another portion the higher values are included.
When the attribute with lower values have probability to drop
out then the feature is considered as increasing factors. And
when the attribute with higher values have probability to drop
out then the feature is considered as decreasing factors.
Thus, considering the above two factors, the following
equations can be formulated:
𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦 𝛼 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠
(1)
1
𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦 𝛼
𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠
(2)
Consequenlty, the above eq. 1 and eq. 2 can be merged as
eq. 3 as following:
𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠
𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦 𝛼
𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠
(3)
If we substitute 𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦
with 𝑇 ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑, 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 with 𝑎𝑖 that
represents attributes having increasing factor property,
and 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 with 𝑏𝑖 that represents attributes
having decreasing factor property.
Then the equation takes the form as following:
𝑎𝑖
𝑇 ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝛼 (4)
𝑏𝑖
Furthermore, the eq. 4 can be written as eq. 5.
𝑎𝑖 ∗ 𝑤𝑎𝑖
𝑇 ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑 = (5)
𝑏𝑖 ∗ 𝑤𝑏𝑖
where, 𝑤𝑎𝑖 is the weight value for increasing factors, 𝑤𝑏𝑖 is
the weight value for decreasing factors, 𝑤𝑎𝑖 is calculated as
𝑎𝑖 ∗ 𝐼𝐺(𝑎), 𝑤𝑏𝑖 is calculated as 𝐼𝐺(𝑏)
The threshold value is calculated in such a way that increas-
ing factors are used as the numerator and decreasing factors are
used as the denominator. When the numerator is incremented
and the denominator is decremented, the threshold value is
incremented. For this reason, the weight value is calculated
in such a way that, the numerator is incremented and the
denominator is decremented. But the students who are at risk
of dropping out, the value of increasing factors are smaller and
the value of decreasing factors are larger. For the larger value
of the denominator and smaller value of numerator creates a
smaller threshold value. This creates a smaller threshold value
for drop out student, and larger threshold value for the student
who can continue his study. The method is a self-organised
method. It can adjust the threshold value by updating it. After
calculating the threshold value if the threshold of new pattern
is less than the given threshold, then it is classified as drop
out. Otherwise, it is classified as continuing study.
IV. I MPLEMENTATION
A. Dataset Description
The dataset “Student Performance Analysis” has been taken
from the renowned dataset repository named as UCI Machine
Learning Repository [3]. Two datasets are integrated in “Stu-
dent Performance Analysis” dataset. One has 395 instances
and another has 649 instances. Both datasets have 33 attributes.
TABLE I
DATASET D ESCRIPTION
Datasets Dataset Attribute Number of Number of
Characteristics Characteristics Attributes Instances
A Multivariate Integer 33 395
B Multivariate Integer 33 649
In Dataset A, number of positive class instances is 293,
and number of negative class instances is 102. In Dataset B,
there are 584 positive instances and 65 negative instances. For
Dataset A, IR is 2.87 and for Dataset B, IR is 8.98. Imbalance
Ratio (IR) is calculated as eq. 6 [15]
𝑇𝑚𝑎𝑗
𝐼𝑅 = (6)
𝑇𝑚𝑖𝑛
where, 𝐼𝑅 is Imbalance Ratio, 𝑇𝑚𝑎𝑗 is the number of positive
class instances, 𝑇𝑚𝑖𝑛 is the number of negative class instances.
B. Feature Importance
To identify the drop out students, the most used features
should be considered. By extracting most important features,
the model can be built utilizing those features. In our proposed
approach, Information Gain (IG) has been used to extract the
features. It is based on Claude Shannon Entropy [16]. The
attribute with highest information gain is referred as the most
important feature. The information gain can be calculated as
[14]
∣𝑐∣
𝐼𝐺(𝑡) = − Σ𝑖=1 𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 )𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 )
+ 𝑃 (𝑡)𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣𝑡)𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣𝑡)
+ 𝑃 (1 − 𝑡)𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣(1 − 𝑡))𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣(1 − 𝑡))
(7)
where, 𝑐𝑖 represents the ith category, 𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ) is the probability of
ith category, P(t) is the probability appears in the documents,
P(1-t) is the probability that doesn’t appear in the documents,
𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣𝑡) is the conditional probability given that t is appeared,
𝑃 (𝑐𝑖 ∣(1 − 𝑡)) is the conditional probability given that t is not
appeared.
Using the eq. 7, the most important features can be found
out. Using these most important features and ignoring the less
important features the dimensionality of the datasets can be
reduced. This to address as high dimensional data are the most
important concerns in classification problem because of space
and time complexity [20].
C. Outlier Detection
Outlier is a data object that varies from other data objects.
It originates due to mechanical errors, changes in system
activities, fraudulent behavior, human error, mechanism error
or simply through regular deviances in inhabitants. Outlier
detection is the method of ruling the patterns of data whose
behaviors are different from other expected data patterns.
Misclassification occurs in the presence of outlier and it creates
error in identifying the required class. Thats why, detecting
outliers is important for proper classification. In this paper,
Cooks distance [21] has been used for outlier detection.
D. Experimental Setup
In our work, k-fold more specifically 5 fold cross validation
is used for evaluating the performance. Firstly, the dataset is
divided into 5 splits. After that among from 5 splits, 4 splits
are used as training data and 1 split is used as test data. And
the method is run for 5 times, so that there remains no data
which aren’t being tested.
The algorithms are executed in MATLAB R2017a. We have
performed all the experiments on a computer occupies; pro-
cessor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60Hz; RAM:
4GB, system type: 64-bit operating system.
E. Evaluation Metrics
To assess the performance of our work, different metrics
such as accuracy, precision [17], recall [17], F1-score [18]
and AUC [19] have been used. Accuracy, precision, recall and
F1-score can be represented as following:
𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 = 𝑇 𝑃 + 𝑇 𝑁/𝐴𝑙𝑙 (8)
𝑃 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 = 𝑇 𝑃/𝑇 𝑃 + 𝐹 𝑃 (9)
𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙 = 𝑇 𝑃/𝑇 𝑃 + 𝐹 𝑁 (10)
𝐹 1𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 = 2∗𝑃 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛∗𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙/𝑃 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛+𝑅𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙 (11)
Where, TP = True Positive, means that the number of students
who can continue study are correctly classified, FP = False
Positive, means that number of drop out students are wrongly
classified as the student who can continue studying, FN =
False Negative, means that the number of students who can
continue study are wrongly classified as drop out students, TN
= True Negative, means that number of drop out students are
correctly classified.
V. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
Evaluation criteria are a key factor to measure the classifica-
tion performance. Our goal is to assess the performance of the
proposed approach on the task of predicting if a student can
complete his graduation on time or not. Binary classification
has been considered in our work. Fig. 1 represents the bar
graph of classification accuracy, comparing the four methods:
Logistic regression, Naive Bayes Classifier, Support Vector
Machine and proposed approach. The accuracy for proposed
approach is better than the classifier algorithms.
Fig. 1. Accuracy for implemented methods (Original Datasets)
In an imbalanced dataset, accuracy does not characterize
between the numbers of appropriately classified patterns of
dissimilar classes. For this, other well-known metrics are also
used for evaluating the performance.
Table II summarizes the precision, recall and F1-score for
the methods. The table represents that proposed approach
has better performance in terms of Precision, Recall and F1-
score. Fig. 2, shows the Area Under the ROC curves (Original
Datasets) and it represents that the AUC for proposed approach
is greater than the AUC for the other classifiers.
Also for the datasets after detecting outlier, it is observed
that the accuracy for proposed approach also perform well.
 TABLE II
E VALUATING PERFORMANCE FOR THE IMPLEMENTED METHODS
(O RIGINAL DATASETS )

Evaluation Dataset A
Metrics Threshold Logistic Naive Support
Regression Bayes Vector Machine
Precision 0.9514 0.9420 0.8927 0.9450
Recall 0.9444 0.9366 0.9087 0.9274
F1-score 0.9476 0.9383 0.9005 0.9357
Evaluation Dataset B
Metrics Threshold Logistic Naive Support
Regression Bayes Vector Machine
Precision 0.9646 0.9628 0.8841 0.9753
Recall 0.9662 0.9588 0.9590 0.9137 Fig. 3. Accuracy for implemented method (After Detecting Outliers)
F1-score 0.9651 0.9607 0.9186 0.9541

TABLE III
E VALUATING PERFORMANCE FOR THE IMPLEMENTED METHODS (A FTER
D ETECTING O UTLIERS )

Evaluation Dataset A
Metrics Threshold Logistic Naive Support
Regression Bayes Vector Machine
Precision 0.9645 0.9639 0.9358 0.9788
Recall 0.9527 0.9570 0.9366 0.8894
F1-score 0.9595 0.9604 0.9360 0.9313
Evaluation Dataset B
Metrics Threshold Logistic Naive Support
Regression Bayes Vector Machine
Precision 0.9845 1.0000 0.9763 1.0000
Recall 0.9931 0.9894 1.0000 0.9845
F1-score 0.9885 0.9946 0.9879 0.9920

Fig. 2. ROC Curves (Original Datasets)

Fig. 3 represents the bar graph of comparing accuracy among

the implemented methods (After Detecting Outliers).
Table III represents the precision, recall and F1-score after
detecting outliers from both of the datasets. From the table it
is observed that the values of precision and F1-score of the
proposed approach is nearly the same as the Logistic Regres-
sion, Naive Bayes Classifier and Support Vector Machine.
In Fig. 4, ROC Curves (After Detecting Outliers) shows the
Area Under the ROC curves for the datasets after detecting
outliers. From Fig. 4, it is found that the Area Under the Curve
for the proposed approach is also larger for the datasets after
detecting outlier.
Here, outlier detection is used to show that, other classi-
fiers perform better after removing outlier. But this method
performs well even there remains any outlier. The method can Fig. 4. ROC Curves (After Detecting Outliers)
handle outliers and identify the students who are at risk of
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