Introduction to educational data mining

Abstract

Educational Data Mining is a relatively new part of Data Mining. It describes a multidisciplinary research field contained Data Mining itself, Statistics, and Machine Learning, applied to Educational Systems. EDM is concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique and increasingly large-scale data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they learn in. Wherever educational information is taken (e.g., universities and intelligent tutoring systems), it often has multiple levels of meaningful hierarchy, which often need to be determined by properties in the data itself, rather than in advance. Issues of time, sequence, and context also play important roles in this field.