Comparison of C4.5 Algorithm and Support Vector Machine in Predicting the Student Graduation Timeliness

Abstract

In higher educational institutions, graduation rates are one of the many aspects to assess the quality of the learning process. Al-Hidayah Islamic University in Bogor is one of the established private Islamic universities to create skilled human resources with moral values required by many companies nowadays. Having another institution in Bogor as a competitor with the same direction and objective is a challenge for Al-Hidayah Islamic University. Thus a solution is required to face the competition. One solution is to predict the student graduation timeliness of the students using data mining method with classification function. The implemented methodology in the data mining is Discovery Knowledge of Database (KDD), starting from selecting, preprocessing, transformation, data mining, and evaluation/ interpretation. There were two Algorithm models used in this paper, namely C4.5 and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification procedure consists of predictor variables and one of the target variables. Predictor variables are gender, Grade Point Average, marital status, and job status. Rapid Miner software was used to process the data. The final results of both Algorithms show an 81% precision rate and 80% accuracy level for the C4.5 Algorithm, while SVM has an 88% precision rate and 85% accuracy level.