Educational Data Mining

IntroductionData mining has been used widely in the areas of science and engineering, such as bioinformatics , genetics , medicine , education and electrical power engineering.

Educational Data Mining (called EDM) is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they learn in.

Use of EDM mining computer logs of student performance.mining enrollment data.predicting student performance.studying learning in order to recommend improvements to current educational practice.

EDM can be considered one of the learning sciences, as well as an area of data mining. A related field is learning analytics.EDM methodsThe types of EDM method are related to those found in data mining in general, but with some differences based on the unique features of educational data.Ryan Baker author of "The State of Educational Data Mining in 2009: A Review and Future VisionsData Mining for Education.Ryan Baker classifies the areas of EDM as follows:Prediction ClassificationRegressionDensity estimation.ClusteringRelationship mining Association rule miningCorrelation miningSequential pattern miningCausal data miningDistillation of data for human judgment.Discovery with models.

Baker and Kalina Yacef claim that discovery with models is particularly prominent in EDM, as compared to data mining in general.

A model of a phenomenon is developed through any process that can be validated in some fashion (most commonly, prediction or knowledge engineering), and this model is then used as a component in another analysis, such as prediction or relationship mining.Application of EDMA list of the primary applications of EDM is provided by Cristobal Romero and Sebastian Ventura.the areas of EDM application are:Analysis and visualization of dataProviding feedback for supporting instructorsRecommendations for studentsPredicting student performanceStudent modelingDetecting undesirable student behaviorsGrouping studentsSocial network analysis

Continue..Developing concept mapsConstructing coursewarePlanning and scheduling EDM work are published at the peer-reviewed International Conference on Educational Data Mining, organized by the International Educational Data Mining Society and also published in the Journal of Educational Data Mining.Many EDM papers are routinely published in related conferences, such as Artificial Intelligence and Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and User Modeling and Adaptive Personalization.

The use of Educational Data Mining in the KDD CupIn 2010, the Association of Computing Machinery's KDD Cup was held, with a data and topic in the domain of educational data mining. The data set was provided by the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop, and consisted of over a million data points from students using Cognitive Tutor educational software. 600 Teams competed for over $8000 dollars in prize money donated by Facebook. The winners used the Random forest, Bayesian Networks, and Feature generation techniques to accurately predict the performance of over half a million unseen student responses.