Abstract
Data mining (DM) is
the process of applying algorithms on large databases with the aim of
discovering knowledge that would help in taking informed decisions by the
management of academic institutions (Chalurapruek, S, et al, 2018). This paper
seeks to discover the best classifiers to be used on educational data when
using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA). The variables of
importance namely carry-over, marital status, age range, entry mode and
accommodation location were selected by J45 classifier. Four sampled datasets
from four schools/faculties namely School of Physical Sciences (SPS), School of
Environmental Studies (SES), School of Technology and Science Education (STSE),
School of Agriculture and Agricultural Technology (SAAT) belonging to Modibbo
Adama University of Technology (MAUTECH), Yola, Nigeria, were used for the DM
task. All the classifiers available in WEKA suite were applied independently on
the four different datasets. Notably, classifiers such as J48, NaiveBayes,
Logistics and Regression gave better performances when compared with the rest.
In the comparative analysis, the Regression model had the overall best
performance of 98.366 %, 99.3197 %, 96.3964 % and 96.875 % on the four datasets
respectively. The computed average performance of each of the four classifiers
on the four datasets gave97.5446 %, 94.6954 %, 95.670125 %, and 97.739275 %
respectively.