Data Mining Techniques in Education

A great challenge in nowadays superior education is to anticipate a certain behavior of a student: request for additional assistance, enrollment in a particular study program, exam promotion rate, mean value of grades, transfer risk, etc. Many institutions can better deal with these student and graduate challenges using some data analysis techniques. As a fairly recent computing topic, Data Mining - also known as Knowledge-Discovery in Databases -- is a process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns. This process uses a lot of traditional computational techniques from statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. These techniques are suited for the prediction of individual behaviors with high accuracy. The aim of the paper is to investigate the capabilities of Data Mining and its applications in superior education through a case study based on real data