A Predictive Model for Mining Opinions of an Educational Database Using Neural Networks

Abstract

Assessing the performance of an educational institute is a prime concern in an educational scenario. Educational Data Mining (EDM) considers several tasks originated from an educational context. One of the tasks identified is providing feedback for supporting instructors, administrators, teachers, course authors in decision making and thereby enable them to take appropriate remedial action. In this research, we have developed a prototype Neural Network Model which is trained to predict the performance of an educational institution. A Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) model had been developed for this proposed research. The network is trained by back propagation algorithm. Data was obtained from a well-defined questionnaire consisting of 14 questions in the domains namely Academic Schedule, International Exposure, Jobs and Internship, Quality of the college, and Life at Campus. The results of these questions have been taken as inputs and performance of the institute has been considered as the output. To, validate the results generated by the network, statistical techniques have been used for the purpose. In this proposed research performance of an educational institution has been predicted. The results generated by the Neural Network and the statistical techniques have been compared in this research and it is observed that, both the methods have generated accurate results. The results have been considered based on the Normalized System Error (NSE) values of the network. A prototype Neural Network model has been developed to assess the performance of an educational institution.