Optimal Selection of Factors Influencing Student Academic Performance in Educational Data Mining

Data mining is widely used in educational field to find the problems arise in this field is called Educational data mining (EDM). The higher institutes aimed to provide quality education to its student and to provide excellent graduates for the country growth. Best way to achieve this level quality education is to analyze the student academic performance. This analysis will help to identify students who are at risk and needs special attention. But student performance depends upon various factors. Number of studies has been carried out on these influencing factors. In this paper, we explore five categories of factors which positively or negatively affect the student performance. These categories are: Family information, Academic information, Personality, Management skill and Miscellaneous. This study will help the students to know their weak points which degrade their performance and also helpful for faculty and institutes management to counsel and motivate the students to improve their abilities who would be found at high risk of failure.