A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data

Selecting the appropriate undergraduate program is a critical decision for students. Many elements influence this choice for secondary students, including financial, social, demographic, and cultural factors. If a student makes a poor choice, it will have implications for their academic life as well...

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Main Authors: Yara Zayed, Yasmeen Salman, Ahmad Hasasneh
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-12-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/24/12525
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author Yara Zayed
Yasmeen Salman
Ahmad Hasasneh
author_facet Yara Zayed
Yasmeen Salman
Ahmad Hasasneh
author_sort Yara Zayed
collection DOAJ
description Selecting the appropriate undergraduate program is a critical decision for students. Many elements influence this choice for secondary students, including financial, social, demographic, and cultural factors. If a student makes a poor choice, it will have implications for their academic life as well as their professional life. These implications may include having to change their major, which will cause a delay in their graduation, having a low grade-point average (GPA) in their chosen major, which will cause difficulties in finding a job, or even dropping out of university. In this paper, various supervised machine learning techniques, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine, were investigated to predict undergraduate majors. The input features were related to the student’s academic history and the job market. We were able to recommend the program that guarantees both a high academic degree and employment, depending on previous data and experience, for Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. This research was conducted based on a published research and using the same dataset and aimed to improve the results by applying hyper-tuning, which was absent in previous research. The obtained results showed that our work outperformed the work of the published research, where the random forest exceeded the other classification techniques and reached an accuracy of 97.70% compared to 75.00% on the published research. The importance of features was also investigated, and it was found that the degree percentage, MBA percentage, and entry test result were the top contributing features to the model.
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spelling doaj.art-eccb0e784d1445849ef51b9c76bbe9252023-11-24T13:00:05ZengMDPI AGApplied Sciences2076-34172022-12-0112241252510.3390/app122412525A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student DataYara Zayed0Yasmeen Salman1Ahmad Hasasneh2Department of Natural Engineering and Technology Sciences, Data Science & Business Analytics, Arab American University, Ramallah P.O. Box 240, PalestineDepartment of Natural Engineering and Technology Sciences, Data Science & Business Analytics, Arab American University, Ramallah P.O. Box 240, PalestineDepartment of Natural Engineering and Technology Sciences, Data Science & Business Analytics, Arab American University, Ramallah P.O. Box 240, PalestineSelecting the appropriate undergraduate program is a critical decision for students. Many elements influence this choice for secondary students, including financial, social, demographic, and cultural factors. If a student makes a poor choice, it will have implications for their academic life as well as their professional life. These implications may include having to change their major, which will cause a delay in their graduation, having a low grade-point average (GPA) in their chosen major, which will cause difficulties in finding a job, or even dropping out of university. In this paper, various supervised machine learning techniques, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine, were investigated to predict undergraduate majors. The input features were related to the student’s academic history and the job market. We were able to recommend the program that guarantees both a high academic degree and employment, depending on previous data and experience, for Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. This research was conducted based on a published research and using the same dataset and aimed to improve the results by applying hyper-tuning, which was absent in previous research. The obtained results showed that our work outperformed the work of the published research, where the random forest exceeded the other classification techniques and reached an accuracy of 97.70% compared to 75.00% on the published research. The importance of features was also investigated, and it was found that the degree percentage, MBA percentage, and entry test result were the top contributing features to the model.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/24/12525recommendation systemeducational data miningmachine learningundergraduate program forecastingsupport vector machinedecision tree
spellingShingle Yara Zayed
Yasmeen Salman
Ahmad Hasasneh
A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
Applied Sciences
recommendation system
educational data mining
machine learning
undergraduate program forecasting
support vector machine
decision tree
title A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
title_full A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
title_fullStr A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
title_full_unstemmed A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
title_short A Recommendation System for Selecting the Appropriate Undergraduate Program at Higher Education Institutions Using Graduate Student Data
title_sort recommendation system for selecting the appropriate undergraduate program at higher education institutions using graduate student data
topic recommendation system
educational data mining
machine learning
undergraduate program forecasting
support vector machine
decision tree
url https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/24/12525
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