2014 13th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications
Improving an Early Warning System to
Prediction of Student Examination
Achievement
Hanife GÖKER
The Institute of Informatic
Gazi University
Ankara, TURKEY
hanifegoker@gmail.com
Abstract— In Turkey, there are many exams for
transition to a higher education institution. These
exams are all stages of life and have a great importance
in the lives of students.As the severity rating of the
exam, particularly students, parents and teachers are
affected and exams create anxiety for
students.Examination results are very important in
shaping the lives of future students. Therefore, in this
study is aimed to estimate the success of students, which
isstudents’ turning point in their lives, in the university
entrance exam.
The aim of this study, using data mining algorithms on
the created student data warehouse, is to estimate the
students’ successes, who are taking the university
entrance exam, by data mining. In this study, it has
been improved a software considering Naive Bayes
algorithms for student data warehouse. By that
developed software by using C# languages, it is aimed to
improve an early warning system that may estimate the
states of the students’ successes in university entrance
exam for students and also for their families.
Keywords-data mining, data warehouse, naive
bayes, classification, estimation of students’ successes,
educational data mining(EDM).
I. INTRODUCTION:
Many countries in the education system, higher
education by getting enough points for a specific
university entrance exam is required to be
successful.In our country, every year more than half
a million students in the university entrance exam
to enter, and this number is increasing every year.
Between high school and university institutions
have too much supply-demand imbalances. This
imbalance, many sections of society who are
government officials, school administrators,
teachers, students and students’ families are greatly
worried [1].
Since higher education ensures high income and
better job opportunities, it is directly related to
individuals’ success in business. From the social
978-1-4799-7415-3/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICMLA.2014.114
Halil Ibrahim BÜLBÜL
Department of Computer and
Instructional Technologies
Gazi University
Ankara, TURKEY
bhalil@gazi.edu.tr
point of view, it has an important role in a
community’s attainment of such socially
determined aims as high quality workforce, equal
opportunities, social unity and development of civil
awareness [2].
Students are prepared to take the exam from a
young age, and therefore competition is growing.In
this exam;there are many factors that affect success
like knowledge of students' grades, family,
classrooms and tutoring information, test anxiety
level, age and sex. For students to be successful in
this exam, analysis of these factors that affect
success of the examination is
required.Therefore,factors affecting the success of
students in the university entrance examination
should be identified and secondary school students'
university entrance examination should be
estimated they would win or lose.Identification of
these factors and estimating the exam successwill
play an important role in the increasing success.
All students in primary and secondary schools in
Turkey, students’ transactions are made via e-
school system.Students' records are held regularly
in the e-school information system.Students of all
data stored on digital media, with a majority of
these data has led to ineffectiveness of traditional
query tools.
As a result, new tendencies emerged such as getting
out valuable knowledge from database by using
data mining techniques on students database.
Implementation of data warehouse, data mining
techniques on the student, the student data
warehouse hidden in obtaining valuable
information and contributes to improving the
quality of education [3].Therefore, for the solution
of different problems, many data mining methods
and algorithms have been developed.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in
the use of data mining to investigate scientific
questions within educational research, an area of
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inquiry termed educational data mining (EDM).
EDM is defined as the area of scientific inquiry
centered on the development of methods for
making discoveries within the unique kinds of data
that come from educational setting and using those
methods to better understand students and the
settings which they learn in. For example, in mining
data about how studentschoose to use educational
software, it may be worthwhileto simultaneously
consider data at the keystroke level,answer level,
session level, student level, classroom level,and
school level. Issues of time, sequence, and context
alsoplay important roles in the study of educational
data [4].
In the literature on student data warehouse
according to data mining applications a variety of
applications were made such as estimation of
students that are inclined to use substance [5]
predicting the student course performance [6],
determination of vocational fields with machine
learning algorithm [7], genetic algorithms in data
mining[8],high-level student modeling with
machinelearning [9] and investigation of the
reasons for students’ academic failure [10].
In this study, at first, data warehouse was formed in
which there is information about students; then,
cumulatively all the factors were found to affect the
degree of success. After early warning systemthat
may estimate the states of the students’ successes in
university entrance exam for students and also for
their families is developed.
information.These data were formed by
investigating factors that affect academic
achievement such as socio-economic level of the
students, education and occupation of their parents,
individual characteristics, classroom knowledge,
students’ grades and absenteeism knowledge, book
reading habits, test anxiety [11-14].
B. Creating the Datawarehouse
The software; consists of four forms that are to
create the data warehouse, to display data, data
mining application and main form.
When first run the software; comes the main formin
front of the user in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The main form
In the software, the first "Data Warehousing"
option by clicking the students of high school
students taking information data warehouse is
created. This form allows to create easily a data
warehouse and in a way to make data entry more
convenient for users. This form consists of four
interconnected parts, including Student General
Information, Family Information, Personal
Information, Students’ Grades and Absenteeism
Knowledge, Figure 2 is shown in.

II. IMPROVED EARLY WARNING

SYSTEM:
The software is developed using Microsoft Visual
Studio 2008 C # .Net and it has been improved a
software considering Naive Bayes algorithms for
student data warehouse.For database design, data
cleaning, solving the problem of missing values and
data transform procedures, SQL Server
Management Studio Express interface program was
used.

A. Process of Obtaining Data

In the application process, a data warehouse was
formed in which there is information about
students. While forming this data warehouse
information obtained from student identification
registries, primary school student file, the
documentation of guidance unit and the student’s
grades was combined.
In this study, formed student data warehouse
consists of 220 records, 20features and 1 class
Figure 2: Creating Data Warehouse Form
Student data warehouse consists of 220 recordshas
been created in this form.
After creating a data warehouseFigure 3 in the form
of data display dataare listed in the data, the records
of each feature can be displayed graphically.

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Figure 3:Displaying Data Warehouse Form
On student data warehouse, evaluation process was
performed by preprocessing data.
C. Data Preprocessing
After the creation of student data warehouse, the
necessary corrections have been made such as
solving the problem of missing values, correcting
noisy data and data transform procedures.In data
preprocessing step, "Structured Query Language"
(SQL) commands were used.
In this study, process made in data preprocessing
step consists of four phases:
Data Cleaning
Within the data obtained from students in the
process of forming the data warehouse, there are
missing values in the features ofstudents’ grades
and absenteeism informationbecause of the filling
incomplete of students who come from others s
th
There isn’t 9th and 10 students’ grades and
absenteeism informationof 2 students coming with
the transferring procedure. Data correction
procedure was made to the records of which D9, N9
and N10features were empty by taking the average
of these fields as showed in the following
command:
- update ogrveriambar set n9=(Select AVG(n9)
From ogrveriambar where n9 is not null) where
n9 is null ;
- update ogrveriambar set n10=(Select AVG(n10)
From ogrveriambar where n10 is not null) where
n10 is null ;
- update ogrveriambar set D9 = ( Select AVG (
D9 ) From ogrveriambar where D9 is not null )
where D9 is null ;
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As D9, N9 and N10features contained numeric
value; missing value was filled up with the average
of features in other examples.
Data Integration
In data integration phrase, combination of data
coming from databases, various information
sources such as student identification registries,
primary school student file, the documentation of
guidance unit and the student’s gradesand
absenteeism information, book reading habits, test
anxiety,socio-economic level of the students,
education, occupation of their parents, individual
characteristics and classroom knowledge.
Data Transform
After data cleaning and data integration step, the
data transform process is performed for
implementation of Naive Bayes algorithm. Naive
Bayes algorithm is applied rather than numeric data
are categorized on the data.Therefore, numerical
records have been categorized with SQL
commands.Some of the data transform process is
given below:
- Update ogrveriambar set n9='n1' where
n9<=100 and n9 >=95
- Update ogrveriambar set n9='n2' where n9<95
and n9 >=90
- Update ogrveriambar set kardes='K2' where
kardes<4 and kardes >=2
- Update ogrveriambar set kardes='K1' where
kardes<2 and kardes>=0
- Update ogrveriambar set ilkogr='I5' where
ilkogr<=5 and ilkogr >=4.5
- Update ogrveriambar set ilkogr='I4' where
ilkogr<4.5 and ilkogr >=4
- Update ogrveriambar set agirbaspuan='A1'
where agirbaspuan<=100 and agirbaspuan>=95
- Update ogrveriambar set agirbaspuan ='A2'
where agirbaspuan<95 and agirbaspuan>=90
Data Reduction
Data reduction process was made to determine
the ones which affect the result so much, to reduce
the process complexity and to be able to make
accurate generalization.In each grade level D9,
D10, D11 and D12absenteeism information
reflectsthe overall students’
attendance.Therefore,"Devam" featurehas been
created to make the process lessby taking the feature found in the test data is divided by the
average ofthese grades absent. number of all negative samples.

- update ogrveriambar set In the third stage, probability of each class; is

Devam=((D9+D10+D11+D12) / 4) where Devam
is null ;
D. Interpretation / Evaluation
In this study, the data in the data warehouse
students to apply Naive Bayes algorithm, is divided
into two groups, including training and test
data.Training data set and test data set was created
using the holdout method.
The holdout method, sometimes called test sample
estimation, partitions the data two mutually
exclusive subsets called a training set and a test set,
or holdout set. The holdout estimate is a random
number that depends on the division into a training
set and a test set [15].
The data is selected about 1/5 the test data and4/5
the training data.Holdout method, a number is
allocated for a sample test data set, the remaining
samples as the training data set is used.175 of them
from the training data set of 220 records, 45 of
them were used as the test data set.In determining
the test data set, each data set in one of five records
test data is acceptable. Holdout method is used
because distribution of data in the data set is
balanced and number of samples of each class is
more.
calculated by the number of frequencies selected
from the ComboBox objectsfeatures. When
calculating this probability,the probability of each
features are multiplied.
The estimation of students' success in exam is
predicted depending on the successful and
unsuccessful examples in the past. If the
specifications of the new samples are completely
different from the past experiences, then the result
of the prediction may come out to be 0. In other
words, if any feature is 0; the result will be 0.One
of the disadvantages of Naive Bayes method is that
conditional probability is 0. To eliminate this
problem, the data which leads to 0 is determined
and the numerator and denominator of each
criterion are added to a very small value.
In the last stage,the probability that whether the test
data set is successful or not according to the
training data set is calculated.
Students’ data is entered to predict the success or
failure in examsin Figure 4.

Test and training data sets are formed to which

Naive Bayes algorithm is applied.The algorithm is
trained with the training data set and it is controlled
by the test data set.Test data are listed in the form,
the data is entered in the test data sets can be
controlled by the algorithm's success.

When making a prediction, firstly, the training data

is transferred to the DataRow object is pulled from
the database. Figure 4: Success estimates form

In the second stage,the “Successful” and As a result, if successful rate is greater than
“Unsuccessful” ones ofthe samples found in the unsuccessful then the prediction is reflected to the
selected vocational field are calculated in two individual as correct, ifsmaller then incorrect, in
variables, as p and q.The p (positive) probability Figure 5.
calculation for each feature is found by dividing the
number of samples among all of the samples of
training data which fall into the positive class and
have the specification that is the same as the value
of the feature found in the test data by the number
of all positive samples. While finding the q
(negative) probability calculation the number of
samples among all of the samples of training data
which fall into the negative class and have the Figure 5: Success results message (p rate and q rate,
specification that is the same as the value of the result: successful)

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With the current study, improving an early warning
system that may estimate the states of the students’
successes in university entrance exam is developed.
As a result of the implementation of the
software,students’exam results and the estimation
of students’ successes in early warning system are
given in Table 1.
Table 1: Estimation results for test data
Total Number of Records 220
Training data 175
Test data 45
Correctly Classified Instances 39
Incorrectly Classified Instances 6 American Journal of Educational Research, 1.10:
Success Percentage (Accuracy) 86,66 %
Analyzing Table 1, the test results are observed that
produces accurate results (86, 66 %), a very large
proportion.
III. CONCLUSIONS:
University entrance exam that affects students’
future status, successful in their professional livesis
the most important thing in their lives. The state of
the students’ successes in university entrance exam
is of great importance for students and also for their
families. So,in this study was estimated the
students’ successes, who are taking the university
entrance exam, by data mining. The result obtained
under the study is listed below:
- In this study, to estimate student achievement, a
student data warehouse have created including
factors such as the grade of secondary school
students, family environment, classroom
information, test anxiety level, in working order,
age, gender and so on.
- In table 2, on estimation of students’ exams
success by using Naive Bayes classification
algorithm, it was concluded that large portion of
it (% 86, 66) could be explained by the features
in the student data warehouse.
- In this study, an early warning system that
predicts the success of students in the university
entrance exam has been developed for students
and their families. The success of the students in
the university entrance exam status was
estimated using a Naive Bayes algorithm.
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This study provides an opportunity to improve their
success withprediction of student examination
achievementin advance. Remedial and
developmental studies can be done for the students
whose examination success was predicted to be
low. Therefore, this study is thought to play an
important rolein increasing students’ achievements.
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