The Impact of Some Socio-Economic Factors on Academic Performance: A Fuzzy Mining Decision Support System

Abstract

Due to the reported impacts of some socio-economic factors on academic performance and nations’ education value, there is need for strong awareness to assist students in making the right decision. To this effect, this study proposes and designs student decision support system for determining the extent to which different levels of some socioeconomic factors involvement can jointly affect academic performance. The factors are: Student’s interest, Relationship status, Entrepreneurial activities, Peer influence, Health and family background. The traditional decision support system architecture was extended in this study by introducing two components: Fuzzy engine and Mining Engine. Fuzzy engine was introduced to capture intra uncertainties in students' judgment about the data gathered and Mining engine to extract hidden and previously unknown interesting patterns from the dataset. The predictive model was established using fuzzy association rule mining technique. The dataset was gathered using one-on-one questionnaire interaction with students from 4 Universities in Nigeria. The system evaluates students' linguistic levels of involvement and predicts the possible class of honours for them with explicit interpretation of the fired patterns. This system will assist the students in decision making as to the extent they can be involved in some socioeconomic activities relative to their family and health status in order to have their desired classes of honour.