A survey on pre-processing educational data

Abstract

Data pre-processing is the first step in any data mining process, being one of the most important but less studied tasks in educational data mining research. Pre-processing allows transforming the available raw educational data into a suitable format ready to be used by a data mining algorithm for solving a specific educational problem. However, most of the authors rarely describe this important step or only provide a few works focused on the pre-processing of data. In order to solve the lack of specific references about this topic, this paper specifically surveys the task of preparing educational data. Firstly, it describes different types of educational environments and the data they provide. Then, it shows the main tasks and issues in the pre-processing of educational data, Moodle data being mainly used in the examples. Next, it describes some general and specific pre-processing tools and finally, some conclusions and future research lines are outlined. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.