Identification of Student Behavioral Patterns in Higher Education Using K-Means Clustering and Support Vector Machine

Abstract

In many academic fields, predicting student academic success using data mining techniques has long been a major research issue. Monitoring students in higher education institutions (HEIs) and having the ability to predict student performance is important to improve academic quality. The objective of the study is to (1) identify features that form clusters that have holistic characteristics and (2) develop and validate a prediction model for each of the clusters to predict student performance holistically. For this study, both classification and clustering methods will be used using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-means clustering. Three clusters were identified using K-means clustering. Based on the learning program outcome feature, there are primarily three types of students: low, average, and high performance. The prediction model with the new labels obtained from the clusters also gained higher accuracy when compared to the student dataset with labels using their semester grade.