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Applying data mining (DM) in education is an emerging interdisciplinary research field also known as educational data mining (EDM). It is concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational environments. Its goal is to better understand how students learn and identify the settings in which they learn to improve educational outcomes and to gain insights into and explain educational phenomena. Educational information systems can store a huge amount of potential data from multiple sources coming in different formats and at different granularity levels. Each particular educational problem has a specific objective with special characteristics that require a different treatment of the mining problem. The issues mean that traditional DM techniques cannot be applied directly to these types of data and problems. As a consequence, the knowledge discovery process has to be adapted and some specific DM techniques are needed. This paper introduces and reviews key milestones and the current state of affairs in the field of EDM, together with specific applications, tools, and future insights. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Business and Industry

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This survey is an updated and improved version of the previous one published in 2013 in this journal with the title "data mining in education". It reviews in a comprehensible and very general way how Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics have been applied over educational data. In the last decade, this research area has evolved enormously and a wide range of related terms are now used in the bibliography such as Academic Science. This paper provides the current state of the art by reviewing the main publications, the key milestones, the knowledge discovery cycle, the main educational environments, the specific tools, the free available datasets, the most used methods, the main objectives, and the future trends in this research area.

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Multilabel learning has become a relevant learning paradigm in the past years due to the increasing number of fields where it can be applied and also to the emerging number of techniques that are being developed. This article presents an up-to-date tutorial about multilabel learning that introduces the paradigm and describes the main contributions developed. Evaluation measures, fields of application, trending topics, and resources are also presented.

This paper shows how web usage mining can be applied in e-learning systems in order to predict the marks that university students will obtain in the final exam of a course. We have also developed a specific Moodle mining tool oriented for the use of not only experts in data mining but also of newcomers like instructors and courseware authors. The performance of different data mining techniques for classifying students are compared, starting with the student's usage data in several Cordoba University Moodle courses in engineering. Several wellknown classification methods have been used, such as statistical methods, decision trees, rule and fuzzy rule induction methods, and neural networks. We have carried out several experiments using all available and filtered data to try to obtain more accuracy. Discretization and rebalance pre-processing techniques have also been used on the original numerical data to test again if better classifier models can be obtained. Finally, we show examples of some of the models discovered and explain that a classifier model appropriate for an educational environment has to be both accurate and comprehensible in order for instructors and course administrators to be able to use it for decision making.

Management of hyperglycemia in hospitalized patients has a significant bearing on outcome, in terms of both morbidity and mortality. However, there are few national assessments of diabetes care during hospitalization which could serve as a baseline for change. This analysis of a large clinical database (74 million unique encounters corresponding to 17 million unique patients) was undertaken to provide such an assessment and to find future directions which might lead to improvements in patient safety. Almost 70,000 inpatient diabetes encounters were identified with sufficient detail for analysis. Multivariable logistic regression was used to fit the relationship between the measurement of HbA1c and early readmission while controlling for covariates such as demographics, severity and type of the disease, and type of admission. Results show that the measurement of HbA1c was performed infrequently (18.4%) in the inpatient setting. The statistical model suggests that the relationship between the probability of readmission and the HbA1c measurement depends on the primary diagnosis. The data suggest further that the greater attention to diabetes reflected in HbA1c determination may improve patient outcomes and lower cost of inpatient care.