Brief Review of Educational Applications Using Data Mining and Machine Learning

Abstract

The large amounts of data used nowadays have motivated research and development in different disciplines in order to extract useful information with a view to analyzing it to solve difficult problems. Data mining and machine learning are two computing disciplines that enable analysis of huge data sets in an automated manner. In this paper, we give an overview of several applications using these disciplines in education, particularly those that use some of the most successful methods in the machine learning community, such as artificial neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian learning and instance-based methods. Although these two areas of artificial intelligence have been applied in many real-world problems in different fields, such as astronomy, medicine, and robotics, their application in education is relatively new. The search was performed mainly on databases such as EBSCO, Elsevier, Google Scholar, IEEEXplore and ACM. We hope to provide a useful resource for the education community by presenting this review of approaches.