An application of data mining to the problem of the university students'dropout using markov chains

摘要

A new application of data mining to the problem of University dropout is presented.A new modeling technique,based on Markov chains,has been developed to mine informatin from data about the University students' behavior.The information extracted by means of the proposed technique has been used to deeply understand te dropout problem,to find out the high-risk popultaion and to drive teh design of suitable politics to reduce it.To represent the behavior of the students the available data have been modeled as a Markov chain and the associated transition probabilities have been used as a base to extract the aforesaid behavioral patterns.The developed technique is general and can be successfully used to study a large range of decisional problems dealing with data in the form of events or time series.The results fo the applicationof the proposed technique to the students' data will be presented.