The investigation of student dropout prediction model in Thai higher education using educational data mining : a case study of faculty of science, prince of Songkla Uni-versity

Abstract EN

The student’s retention rate is one of the challenging issues that represents the quality of the university.

A high dropout rate of students affects not only the reputation of the university but also the students’ career in the future.

Therefore, there is a need of student dropout analysis in order to improve academic plan and management to reduce students drop out from the university as well as to enhance the quality of the higher education system.

Data mining technique provides powerful methods for the analysis and the prediction of the dropout.

This paper proposes a model for predicting students’ drop- out using the dataset from the representative of the largest public university in the Southen part of Thai- land.

In this study, data from Faculty of Science, Prince of Songkla University was collected from academic year of 2013 to 2017.

The experiment result shows that JRip rule induction is the best tech- nique to generate a prediction model receiving the highest accuracy value of 77.30%.

The results high- light the potential prediction model that can be used to detect the early state of dropping out of the student which the university can provide supporting program to improve the student retention rate.