Implementation of Exploratory Data Analysis and Artificial Neural Networks to Predict Student Graduation on-Time

Abstract

Almost all universities in Indonesia face the problem of a low number of students graduating on time. This will affect higher education accreditation. For this reason, universities must pay attention to the timely graduation of their students. The way that can be taken is to predict students' graduation on time. This research aims to predict students' timely graduations using a combination of exploratory data analysis and artificial neural networks. Exploratory data analysis is used to study the relationship between features that influence students' on-time graduation, while artificial neural networks are used to predict on-time graduation. This research goes through method stages, starting with determining the dataset, exploratory data analysis, data preprocessing, dividing training and test data, and applying artificial neural networks. From the research, it was found that Work features and GPS features greatly influence graduation on time. Students who study while working are less likely to graduate on time compared to students who do not work. Students who have an average GPS above 3.00 for eight consecutive semesters will find it easier to graduate on time. Meanwhile, Age and Gender features have no effect on graduating on time. With a percentage of 50% training data and 50% test data, epoch 100, and learning rate 0.001, the best network model was obtained to predict graduation on time with an accuracy rate of 69.84%. The research results also show that the amount of test data and the learning rate can influence the level of accuracy. Meanwhile, the number of epochs does not affect the level of accuracy.