A Study of the Applications of Data Mining Techniques in Higher Education

Abstract

Data mining is used to extract meaningful information and to develop significant relationships among variables stored in large data set. 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 and student’s performance. The main objective of higher education institutions is to provide quality education to its students. One way to achieve highest level of quality in higher education system is by discovering knowledge for prediction regarding enrolment of students in a particular course, 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, prediction about students’ performance. The paper aims to purpose the use of Data mining techniques to improve the efficiency of higher educational institutions. If data mining techniques such as clustering, dicision tree and association can be applied to higher education processes, it can help improve student’s performance.