Abstract—Educational organizations are one of the important parts of our society and playing a vital role for growth and development of any nation. Data Mining is an emerging technique with the help of this one can efficiently learn with historical data and use that knowledge for predicting future behavior of concern areas. Growth of current education system is surely enhanced if data mining has been adopted as a futuristic strategic management tool. The Data Mining tool is able to facilitate better resource utilization in terms of student performance, course development and finally the development of nation's education related standards. In this paper a student data from a community college database has been taken and various classification approaches have been performed and a comparative analysis has been done. In this research work Support Vector Machines (SVM) are established as a best classifier with maximum accuracy and minimum root mean square error (RMSE). The study also includes a comparative analysis of all Support Vector Machine Kernel types and in this the Radial Basis Kernel is identi fied as a best choice for Support Vector Machine. A Decision tree approach is proposed which may be taken as an important basis of selection of student during any course program. The paper is aimed to develop a faith on Data Mining techniques so that present education and business system may adopt this as a strategic management tool.

Index Terms—Data mining, education data mining, data classification, support vector machine, decision tree.

S. Agarwal is working as Assistance Professor in Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, A Center of Excellence in IT established by the Human Resource De velopment Ministry, Government of India, New Delhi.
G. N. Pandey is working as Adjunct Professor in Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, A Center of Excellence in IT established by the Human Resource De velopment Ministry, Government of India, New Delhi.
M. D. Tiwari is the Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, A Center of Ex cellence in IT established by the Human Resource Development Ministry, Government of India, New Delhi.

Cite: Sonali Agarwal, G. N. Pandey, and M. D. Tiwari, "Data Mining in Education: Data Classification and Decision Tree Approach," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 140-144, 2012.