Students' performance prediction employing Decision Tree

An optimized educational community is a must in this modern era. The intersection of educational activities and the transformative potentials of Educational Data Mining (EDM) should be traversed, highlighting the reasoning behind the importance of EDM. Prior prediction of how a student stands academically, can facilitate them towards a much safer approach with their life decisions. This study uses the vast power and analytical domain of EDM, combining it with machine learning models, upholding an accurate prediction of students' academic performance. The study consists of a dataset containing academic, demographic and social data of undergraduate students. The paper aims to analyze comprehensively the features that act behind academic performance. Lastly, it compares the impact of non-academic data separately on a student's performance and with academic data as well. Traditional machine learning algorithms perform quite well in general, with SVM giving a best accuracy of around 95% with academic data, while training and testing the model without academic data still gives a good performance of 93%. The hierarchical tree from Decision Tree visualizes the key features, which include past results, family members' qualification levels and their jobs, hobbies of the student, commute time, and more.