Title
Investigation of College Dropout with the Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm
Abstract
Up to 50% of the students drop out of school in Brazilian universities. Because of the heterogeneity of individuals, it is difficult to determine which are the main causes of this high percentage of students not finishing their degree. In this paper, we employed the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm on a dataset composed of real-world registers of the Biology Undergraduate course from Brazilian universities. We applied the transactional distance theory to select the set of variables which were utilized in the clustering process. The results indicate that the data is better divided into five groups. We observed that the Fuzzy C-Means generated groups based on how engaged the students are, and, in each group, there are two subgroups: students that drop out and do not drop out the course. The type of analysis presented in this work can generate inputs for the institutions to establish new policies to reduce the dropout rate.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICALT.2019.00055
2019 IEEE 19th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Education Assessment,School Dropout,Clustering,Distance Education,Gap Statistic
Computer science,Fuzzy logic,Algorithm,Distance education,Transactional distance,Educational assessment,Drop out,Cluster analysis
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
2161-377X
2161-3761
978-1-7281-3486-4
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
2
Authors
8