Educational data mining (EDM) is an emerging interdisciplinary research area concerned with analyzing and studying data from academic databases to better understand the students and the educational settings. In most of the Asian countries, it is a challenging task to perform EDM due to the diverse characteristics of the educational data. In this study, we have performed students’ educational performance prediction, pattern analysis and proposed a generalized framework to perform rigorous educational analytics. To validate our proposed framework, we have also conducted extensive experiments on a real-world dataset that has been prepared by the transcript data of the students from the Marketing department of a renowned university in Bangladesh. We have applied six state-of-the-art classification algorithms on our dataset for the prediction task where the Random Forest model outperforms the other models with accuracy 94.1%. For pattern analysis, a tree diagram has been generated from the Decision Tree model.

The Air Pressure System (APS) is a type of function used in heavy vehicles to assist braking and gear changing. The APS failure dataset consists of the daily operational sensor data from failed Scania trucks. The dataset is crucial to the manufacturer as it allows to isolate components which caused the failure. However, missing values and imbalanced class problems are the two most challenging limitations of this dataset to predict the cause of the failure. The prediction results can be affected by the way of handling these missing values and imbalanced class problem. In this paper, we have examined and presented the impact of five different missing value imputation techniques namely: Expectation Maximization, Mean Imputation, Soft Impute, MICE, and Iterative SVD in producing significantly better results. We have also performed an empirical comparison of their performance by applying five different classifiers namely: Naive Bayes, KNN, SVM, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosted Tree on this highly imbalanced dataset. The primary aim of this study is to observe the impact of the mentioned missing value imputation techniques in the enhancement of the prediction results, performing an empirical comparison to figure out the best classification model and imputation technique. We found that the MICE imputation and the random under-sampling techniques are the highest influential techniques for improving the prediction performance and false negative rate.

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is one of the leading causes of death around the world. However, there is no cure for this disease yet; only treatments after early diagnosis may help to relieve the symptoms. This study aims to analyze the impact of feature selection techniques on the performance of diagnosing PD by incorporating different data mining techniques. To accomplish this task, identifying the best feature selection approach was the primary focus. In this paper, the authors had applied five feature selection techniques namely: Gain Ratio, Kruskal-Wallis Test, Random Forest Variable Importance, RELIEF and Symmetrical Uncertainty along with four classification algorithms (K-Nearest Neighbor, Logistic Regression, Random forest, and Support Vector machine) on the PD dataset collected from the UCI Machine Learning repository. The result of this study was obtained by taking the four different subsets (Top 5, 10, 15, and 20 features) from each feature selection approach and applying the classifiers. The obtained result showed that in terms of accuracy, Random Forest Variable Importance, Gain Ratio, and Kruskal-Wallis Test techniques generated the highest 89% score. On the other hand, in terms of sensitivity, Gain Ratio and Kruskal-Walis Test approaches produced the highest 97% score. The findings of this research clearly indicated the impact of feature selection techniques on predicting PD and our applied methods outperformed the state-of-the-art performance.