Evolutionary Algorithm Based Rule(s) Generation for
Personalized Courseware Construction in Educational
Data Mining
Sreenath. K1, Jeyakumar. G2
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India
1
cb.en.p2cse15021@cb.students.amrita.edu, 2g_jeyakumar@cb.amrita.edu
Abstract—Evolutionary Computing for Educational Data
Mining is a research field which with the applications of
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to mine, analyze and modify
educational data. This paper presents the most relevant studies
conducted in this research area. The paper also describes
different EAs used for implementing different data mining
techniques. It goes on to list how these algorithms are utilized by
different educational users to carry out different tasks. Finally, a
new combination of EA, Educational User and data mining
technique is suggested for implementation. As a part of that a
personalized courseware construction technique is proposed and
a sample courseware is constructed using the proposed
technique. The details about the rule construction and the data
mining process involved in the courseware construction
techniques are also explained.
Keywords—Evolutionary algorithms; Educational Data
Mining; Courseware Construction; Association Rule Mining;
Differential Evolution.
I. INTRODUCTION
Evolutionary Algorithms are the optimization tools that are
based on Darwinian principles of evolution. An EA works
with the biological evolution mechanisms like reproduction,
mutation, crossover, selection. Initially, a population of
candidate solutions is formed randomly then new and better
solutions are evolved from these candidates using the
biological processes. The major motivation for using
evolutionary algorithms for data mining tasks is that they
utilize powerful and efficient search methodologies in order to
carry out a global search in the solution space. These
algorithms, by various research works, have been found to
cope better than the classical greedy data mining techniques to
arrive at solutions.
Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a data mining research
area concerned with creating methods for exploring different
classes of data from various educational information
structures, and using them to better understand students,
teacher and the teaching-learning process[1]. The main
purpose of educational data mining is to convert the raw
educational data into useful information to analyze and
interpret different educational research issues. Since data
mining processes are usually approximation problems, it has
been found that the evolutionary algorithms tend to cope better
978-1-5090-0612-0/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
than the classical greedy techniques to arrive at stronger
solutions [2]. The use of evolutionary algorithms for mining
data from the educational database is an emerging research
area. Popular evolutionary algorithms used are Genetic
Algorithm (GA), Genetic Programming (GP) and Differential
Evolution (DE) and the common data mining techniques used
are classification, clustering, association rule mining and
summarization.
II. EDUCATIONAL DATA MINING
Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a research area that is
concerned with applying different data mining techniques to
extract data from the educational databases, and using mined
data to better understand and improve the teaching-learning
processes in educational environments. The EDM has
following four key areas of application [3],
1) Improving student models: student models describe a
student’s characteristics such as the student’s
attitudes, current knowledge and motivation.
2) Improving domain models that involve developing
algorithms for determining the knowledge structure
models which explain the knowledge
interrelationships in a domain.
3) Evaluating the academic support provided by the
learning tool, which involves course and teaching
effectiveness; and
4) Scientific research into learning and learners to
obtain deeper understanding of the key aspects
impacting learning.
The EDM can be defined by describing different groups of
users and the tasks that the user is required to perform. The
different users involved are:
1) Learners / Students,
2) Educators,
3) Course authors,
4) Organizations and
5) Administrators.
There are a number of tasks that an educational environment
resolves through different data mining techniques. Some of the
tasks performed by different users are:
1) Providing feedback for teachers: The main aim of
providing feedback is to improve the instructors'
decision making and to make appropriate actions.
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
Online based quiz systems are becoming extremely
popular for obtaining quick and honest feedback from
the students. Recently use of multiple choice
questions for feedback has also become popular
where students are asked to choose the best possible
reaction [11]. Using these responses, a large amount
of knowledge can be mined about the students. The
most commonly used data mining methods for this
purpose are association rule mining, clustering,
classification and pattern analysis.
2) Course recommendations for students:
Recommending relevant and useful courses for the
students is a very crucial task for an e-learning
system. The system has to recommend appropriate
courses for the students based on their search history
and previous courses so that new and similar courses
in the system are taken up by the students.
Association rule mining and clustering are commonly
used for this purpose.
3) Grouping students: The e-learning systems attract a
large number of students from all over the world. It
becomes a necessity to group students based on their
performance, characteristics and interests. To group
the students, based on their features, classification
and clustering are used.
4) Predicting student performance: The main
functionality of predicting student performance is to
calculate a value which is to illustrate the features of
a student. The data mining techniques like regression,
classification and clustering predict student
performance based on the quantitative information
provided.
5) Student modelling: Student model ling is the process
of developing models for students based on their skill
and knowledge. Student models assess a range of
features of a student such as behavior and
motivational character. Clustering and classification
are the major data mining techniques used for this
purpose.
6) Courseware modelling and maintenance: The main
objective of this task is to help the instructors and the
authors in the development and maintenance of their
courseware. It also attempts to reuse the existing
resources to different users and learners. Association
rules and clustering have been widely used by the
developers in order to develop different arguments
for construction and maintenance of courseware.
III. LITERATURE SURVEY
Research works in Evolutionary Algorithms for educational
data mining have been taking place since the inception of
EDM. Given most institutions across the globe use some form
of educational data mining, it is very crucial that the data
mining methods be updated so as to attain the maximum
efficiency. A number of research works have found that the
usage of evolutionary algorithms have contributed greatly to
the effectiveness of different data mining techniques. This
survey discusses strategies used by the authors to use EAs for
EDM.
Hypermedia Educational Systems are online systems that
enable the student to have a course based on his/her interests
and qualities. A method to alter the contents of the course is
proposed by Romero [4]. Association rules are created based
on the results taken from the evaluation of a Hypermedia
Course on Rheumatology. Using GA, every individual encodes
a solution and evolves into a more effective individual by
reproduction. Using an appropriate selection method, here
Elitist selection, strongest individuals are retained and the
weak individuals are selected for reproduction. Mutation
involves creating a new rule from an existing rule by changing
a value or variable. Crossover involves making new
individuals from existing rules by interchanging the
consequent and antecedent. The rules which have the highest
support and confidence values are retained through each
generation. The paper goes on to suggest that GA is an
efficient technique for extracting a small set of comprehensive
rules.
GA has been found to be one of the major influences in the
data mining area. Minaei-Bidgoli uses GA [5] for
classification technique for classifying students on the basis of
their marks. Classifying students is one of the most widely
used features of educational data mining. Initially the training
set and the classes are found from the data. A feature vector is
an individual which is formed by the values of six variables
defined based on the time, rate of success and failure and
student interactions. Each individual is formed based on these
features with each taking either 0 or 1. The population is
initially formed randomly and reproduction process is
performed on the population. The fitness function is the error
rate achieved between the training data and each individual.
The individuals with highest fitness are preserved for the next
generation and the others are selected for reproduction. After a
number of iterations, the new testing data is given to the
system and the performance of new student is predicted.
Subgroup discovery for predicting student performance is
one of the widely used tasks by an institution. The research
works reported in [6, 7] suggest algorithms to classify students
based on association rules formed from the data. These
techniques are extensively used for educational purposes for
mining data to better understand learning techniques and get
inferences about the students. Rules which describe subsets of
the population are formed to discover subgroups. These rules
describe the relationships between the students’ utilization of
the various modules and activities delivered by this e-learning
system and the grades procured in the courses. GA is used for
inducing the fuzzy rules formed from the data. Fitness
measure is calculated using accuracy, coverage and
significance values. It compares the experimental results of
subgroup discovery for Moodle e-learning data in the classical
algorithms and EAs. Apriori-SD and CN2-SD are the two
classical data mining algorithms used for subgroup discovery
and SDIGA and MESDIF are the two evolutionary algorithms
used. In the experiment, 5 courses have been chosen involving
a total of 293 students. The rules are obtained for all the
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
algorithms. SDIGA and MESDIF employ fuzzy rules to
discover the subgroups. Then the experiment is conducted and
the quality measures are recorded. Comparing the results of
the experiment, suitability of EA to this problem was found. It
was also found that the EA offer information with a lesser
number of variables and rules.
To predict student performance, classification technique
which integrates GA and Support Vector Machine (SVM)
algorithm was introduced by Malviya [8]. Sequential Minimal
Optimization (SMO) algorithm is the training algorithm in
WEKA tool for SVM classification. The SMO algorithm divides
the solution of a large quadratic programming optimization
problem into a number of smaller QP problems. Using the
SMO algorithm, set with selected feature subset and value of
parameters are trained. The population based on the fitness
values computed from the SVM classifier is selected. By
applying the genetic operations the process in continued until
the optimal feature subset is obtained. The new method
(SMO+GA) described was found to remove the insignificant
features and effectively find best parameter values. The new
method was compared with the classical SMO algorithm, and
was found that the correctly classified items are increased in
the new algorithm.
Decision tree is a decision support tool that describes rules
through trees. A combination of decision trees and GA is used
to predict the student course performance [9]. Decision tree is
a very popular method used for classification. Using decision
trees, the information contained in the data is broken down
and sub divided to discover rules and relationships. Each tree
is considered as a chromosome in a population. Applying the
genetic operators, new generations are consequently obtained
and the individuals with best fitness values are found. The
total number of misclassification is taken as the fitness
function. The simple GA (SGA) is performed on the data and
the efficiency is calculated. It is then compared with the
normal genetic algorithm to assess the efficiency. The
Association-based GA (AGA) achieves greater prediction
accuracy in lesser computation time for classification than
simple GA when evaluated using five-fold cross validation.
This study helps the teachers to improve the student
categorizing, and also determine the students who require
individual attention.
Genetic Programming (GP) is another evolutionary
algorithm which is commonly used to implement data mining
methods. Unlike GA, GP makes use of tree structures to form
each individual. Knowledge discovery using GP for providing
feedback to courseware authors is another application of
evolutionary algorithms [10]. The main aim of this work is to
recognize powerful dependence relationships within the data
gathered from various students’ sessions. The data initially is
pre-processed for mining, using the tasks: attribute selection,
data cleaning, transforming continuous attributes and data
integration. This pre-processing is done to extract a subset of
valid rules from the whole set of rules discovered. Association
rules are formed from the data and the trees are created to
form the individuals of the population. Then the algorithm is
applied to the population. This paper goes on to compare the
classical data mining algorithms to GP and found that GP
discovers more interesting rules than classic algorithms. One
of the advantages the GP has over the classical algorithms is
the ability of flexible capacity to represent the individuals.
Another application is in the use of Multiple-choice Quiz
(MCQ) for knowledge discovery. MCQ is one of the most
widely used forms of tests in education [11]. The data
obtained from MCQs provide numerous information such as
scores for each question and the time taken for each question
etc. Association rule mining is a widely accepted method for
mining the educational data. This paper introduces a new
technique of combining grammar-based GP and association
rule mining to extract information from the database. During
pre-process, matrices are generated from the data. A new
method called Grammar-Guided GP Association Rule Mining
(G3PARM) is used in this paper to mine the data. This has
been found better than the classical association rule mining
algorithm as it produced lesser number of rules but with
highest support and confidence. The course feedback can be
obtained to assess the effect of applying the updates in the
quiz. The course can be updated with the new rules which
have the best confidence-support ratio.
Predicting student failure [12] at institutions has become
one of the most challenging tasks for the institution since it is
affected by a number of factors. So pre-processing becomes
one of the most important tasks to be carried out during
mining process since it decides attributes to be selected for
prediction. WEKA tool [13] provides feature selection
algorithms to perform attribute selection. The decision trees
are then formed and the GP algorithm is applied to the
population. The algorithm is compared with the classical data
mining approaches. The true positive rate, true negative rate,
accuracy of the evolutionary data mining was found to be
more than the classical algorithms.
Building a student performance prediction model is one of
the most widely used task in educational data mining. In [14],
for this purpose variables based on Subject, Division of Labor,
Rules are constructed. Based on these variables decision trees
are made to form the individuals in GP. The genetic operators
are applied to the candidates. A confusion matrix of the model
is calculated to allow comprehensive analysis of the prediction
performance. Sensitivity and specificity are used as measures
of fitness obtained from the matrix. RandomTree algorithm is
used to create the tree structures for decision trees. A
hierarchical structure is created based on the conditions which
optimizes the algorithm to predict student performance.
Another work where student performance prediction is the
objective is given by Zafra and Ventura [15]. It uses Multiple
Instance Learning (MIL) which generates a classifier that
classifies unseen patterns. An extension of MIL combined with
GP (G3P-MI) was introduced. The attributes are initially
selected for the system and the rules are formed by the
attributes. Methods based on supervised learning, logistic
regression, neighbour distance are assessed with GP.
Accuracy, sensitivity and specificity are used to compare the
different techniques and results were found in favour of EA. A
comparison is made between the classical multiple instance
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
learning algorithms and G3P-MI and better accuracy,
sensitivity and specificity were found for G3P-MI. A multi-
gene genetic programming is used for predicting student
failure rate [16]. A multi-gene individual is a tree consisting of
multiple attributes which form each individual in the
population. Here the number of genes is four. The population
is formed and the genetic operators are applied.
Student modelling is another direction of research in
Educational Data Mining. The authors in [22] generated the
learning curve for showing the variations in students’ learning
capacity in the class room. An attempt to predict the learning
style of individual students in a class through on-line games is
done in [23]. As an approach to model human brain, a
simulated computational model for human brain is presented
in [24].
IV. SUMMARY OF SURVEY
The authors have reviewed the research works which used EAs
for different EDM purposes. The uses EAs, through various
experiments, have been proved to be better than the classical
data mining techniques. Also, hybridization of EAs and the
data mining techniques provide far better results. The details
of the most relevant research works in this field are detailed in
this survey.
One of the major decisions to take when designing an
EDM system is to choose the task the system performs. There
are a number of tasks that an EDM system can perform.
Romero [17] defines a number of categories of tasks that can
be done by an EDM system. Main categories described are
listed in Section 2. Apart from them the two other important
tasks are: Recommendations for authors and providing
feedback for authors. A problem in EDM is categorized by
four factors:
1) The task: providing feedback, course
recommendations, grouping students, predicting
student performance, student modelling and
courseware maintenance.
2) The user: Students, Educators, Course authors,
Organizations and Administrators.
3) The data mining technique: classification, clustering,
association rule mining
4) The algorithm: Apriori Algorithms, EAs, etc
The Table 1 summarizes the factors involved in each of the
paper. The papers discussed in section 3 also have proved that
using EAs for EDM tasks is robust and efficient in terms of
providing required mining with less number of features and
improved accuracy.
The objective of this survey on EAs for EDM is to identify
a problem to solve a complicated EDM task by an efficient
EA. This also has an intension to prove the robustness and
simplicity of the EAs in hard EDM task. Identification of a
problem in EDM involves the identification of the above said
four factors (task, user, technique and algorithm).
Among all the EDM tasks the courseware (course material)
related tasks need special attention. The objective of
constructing/developing courseware, as given by Romero [17],
is to assist the teachers and course authors to realize the
process of developing courseware and automatic content
learning. Based on the student feedbacks, evaluations, the
methods the student use to learn, the course needs to be
upgraded constantly.
According to recent surveys, the research line of
construction and maintaining courseware has had the
minimum number of papers published [17]. Hence we choose
the task for our problem as: Courseware construction and
maintenance. A figure comparing number of research works in
each of EDM task is shown in Figure 1. As well as, most of
the research works which implement this task use the classical
data mining algorithms. García [18, 19] implemented methods
of Apriori algorithm in order to form different association
rules for knowledge discovery. These rules are used to
recommend courseware authors on the changes to make in the
current system.
Experiments have proved that most evolutionary
algorithms tend to extract better and relevant data than the
classical data mining techniques. So, it is evident from the
literature that EAs are used for accurate knowledge extraction.
GA and GP are found to be widely used for educational data
mining tasks.
Many research works in solving optimization problems
have arrived at the conclusion that DE were found to be better
than GA and GP [20]. Studies show that that DE has a greater
degree of advantages than GA [25, 26]. Hegerty [20] validated
this for solving N-queens problem and travelling salesman
problem. The experiments showed that the optimum solutions
were found in lesser generations by DE than GA. Vesterstrom
[21] compared DE with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
algorithm with 34 benchmark problems. It was found that the
mean and standard deviations for DE were found to be better
than PSO and other EAs. Vesterstrom goes on to state that DE
is a simple, fast and robust and finds the optimum in almost
every run. Moreover, it has only a very less number of
parameters to be set, and the same parameters can be utilized
for a number of different problems. Based on these insights
about DE, we chose DE for our experiment.
The courseware authors have to regularly update the
courseware for improving the performance of the system. The
recommendations for the authors are an important aspect for
an educational system. Hence, we choose the course authors
as user for our problem. Finally, since association rules are
simple and efficient tool for analyzing and predicting student
behaviour, we selected association rules as our data mining
technique.
Thus, based on the summary of literature survey this paper
proposes to implement a system for “courseware construction
for course authors, using association rule mining and
differential evolution algorithm”. As a preliminary step
towards this direction of work a sample courseware
construction using the tool KEEL is done and the observations
are reported in next section.
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

TABLE I. THE SUMMARY OF FACTORS IN EDM

Sno Ref. No. Task User Data Mining Technique Algorithm

Improve performance Teacher Association rules Genetic Algorithm
1 [4]
Predicting Student Performance Institution Classification Genetic Algorithm
2 [5]
Grouping Students Management Classification using rules. Genetic Algorithm
3 [6] (for teachers)
Predict final grade Institutions Classification Genetic Algorithm
4 [7]
Students performance Institutions Classification(SVM) Genetic Algorithm
5 [8]
Predicting the student performance Institution Association Rules Genetic algorithm
6 [9]
Providing feedback to improve Courseware authors Association Rules Genetic Programming
7 [10] courseware
Providing Feedback Instructors Association Rule Mining Genetic Programming
8 [11]
Detecting student failure Institutions Classification using association rules Genetic Programming
9 [12]
Student performance prediction to Instructors Decision trees Genetic Programming
10 [14] monitor students’ progress
Predict a student's performance Institutions Prediction rules Genetic Programming
11 [15]
Predict student failure rate to Educational Decision trees Genetic Programming
12 [16] evaluate the performance of curricula administrators

Fig. 1. The Number of Paper in Each Task (Figure courtesy, [4])

A courseware construction technique where students are

V. SAMPLE COURSEWARE CONSTRUCTION
This section initially presents a survey of various existing
courseware construction techniques in the literature and
discusses the construction of a sample courseware based on
the problem statement.
divided into different clusters based on students' academic
history is proposed in [28]. A web tutor tree is formed using
this data, and algorithms are suggested to form personalized
trees. Each node in the tree has information about the students,
represented in weights. A concept hierarchy technique is
described in [29] which divide the contents into concepts. The
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
online processing step is described in [30], is an adaptive
system for authors based on their needs. A profile of the user
is used in order to recommend contents for the students in [29]
and [30]. The use of clustering methods to categorize
courseware materials are proposed in [31]. It is a tool based on
web Semantics framework. It is implemented with the aim of
assisting users to organize courseware resources with the
usage of Bisection K-Means algorithm. Clustering is used to
group learning documents according on their topics and
similarities. A graph system called Document Index Graph
(DIG) is introduced for representation of documents. In [32],
the author discusses a method where the materials suitable for
different learning styles of students are framed.
A system based on Felder-Silverman learning style is
introduced in [23] to determine the learning style of individual
students in a class. Our experiment uses the database
constructed in [23] as a knowledge source to mine the learning
styles of students and/or classes at different levels.
From the individual learning styles, we focus on to mine
the learning style of the whole class as well as the learning
style of meaningful groups in a class such as Top Performers,
Average Performers and Below Average Performers. We use
association rule mining to identify learning styles at different
levels. The association rules generated by the proper EA are
used as the basis for constructing the courseware.
This work initially focuses on constructing personalized
courseware for individual students using association rule
mining. The learning styles defined by the system [23] are
visual, verbal, active, reflective, sequential, global, sensing
and reflective. The system developed in the document
evaluates the learning style of each of the student through
different games and assign scores accordingly. Each student in
a class obtains a score for every learning style based on the
level they complete in each of the corresponding game.
Now using these scores, we propose to form strong
association rules to produce a new measure for their learning
style. The rules generated by the proposed idea would give
insight about strengths and weaknesses of a student’s learning
style. Using these parameters, appropriate courseware
(learning materials) can be constructed and provided to the
students.
KEEL is a software tool to implement different EAs for
different problems in data mining. We used KEEL as tool for
our experiment. Since GA is very native to KEEL tool, we
initially used GA for rule generation. The tool, using GA,
formed various rules by defining relationships between
different learning styles of the students. The rules are
generated based on the support and confidence achieved for
every rule. The average support value is 0.36 and the
confidence value is 1.0. Based on the different learning styles,
personalized courseware is constructed. A sample rule
constructed in our experiment is show below
IF "intui" value=" [2.857, 3.529]"
THEN "sens" value="[2.142, 2.875]"
This rule shows that if the intuitive learning style of a
student is within the range of the score mentioned then he/she
tends to be a sensitive learner. Hence, if conceptual materials
are given as a courseware, then he/she can be given
questionnaires and presentations also as materials.
IF "verbal" value="[3.333, 3.543]" AND "sens"
value="[2.142 2.875]"
THEN "intui" value="[2.857, 3.529]"
This rule indicates that if the verbal and sensitive learning
styles are within the respective score range then he/she is
marked for intuitive learning style. Thus, adding discussions
and questionnaires would augment the concepts included in
the courseware. The suggestions to construct the courseware
are derived from the association rules formed by the KEEL
tool. Accordingly sample coursewares are constructed and
verified the correctness of the content of the courseware with
individual students.
In courseware construction of a subject a pool of suitable
text documents (.pdf, .docx and .txt etc), audio files, video
files, images, presentations and questionnaires are to be made
available in a source. Now, based on the rules generated and
the learning style identified by the system different
courseware can be suggested for the different students.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper has presented the details of the papers reported in
the literature for using Evolutionary Algorithms for
Educational Data Mining. Even though there was less number
of reports found in this field of research, the authors have
presented all the papers in detail. The summary of four factors
(task, user, technique and algorithm) with respect to all the
papers presented in this paper would be useful to the readers
interested in doing research in this direction. As an initial
attempt in this direction of research, a personalized
courseware construction strategy is proposed. The proposed
strategy is implemented and tested using the KEEL tool. Set of
association rules are generated from the student learning style
database, suggestions to construct the courseware are derived
from the rules and sample courseware are constructed for
students based on their learning styles.
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