Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
DOI 10.1007/s13042-015-0341-x
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Improved student dropout prediction in Thai University using
ensemble of mixed-type data clusterings
Natthakan Iam-On • Tossapon Boongoen
Received: 19 August 2014 / Accepted: 9 February 2015
Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract Increasing student retention has been a com-
mon goal of many academic institutions, especially in the
university level. The negative effects of student attrition
are evident to students, parents, university and the society
as a whole. The first-year students are at the greatest risk of
dropping out or not completing their degree on time. With
this insight, a number of data mining methods have been
developed for early detection of students at risk of dropout,
hence the immediate application of assistive measure. As
compared to western countries, this subject has attracted
only a few studies in Thai university, with educational data
mining being limited to the use of conventional classifi-
cation models. This paper presents the most recent inves-
tigation of student dropout at Mae Fah Luang University,
Thailand, and the novel reuse of link-based cluster
ensemble as a data transformation framework for more
accurate prediction. The empirical study on mixed-type
data collection related to students’ demographic detail,
academic performance and enrollment record, suggests that
the proposed approach is usually more effective than sev-
eral benchmark transformation techniques, across different
classifiers.
Keywords Ensemble clustering  Classification  Feature
transformation  Student dropout  Educational data mining
N. Iam-On (&)
School of Information Technology, Mae Fah Luang University,
Chiang Rai 57100, Thailand
e-mail: nt.iamon@gmail.com
T. Boongoen
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Royal Thai
Air Force Academy, Bangkok 10220, Thailand
e-mail: tossapon_b@rtaf.mi.th
1 Introduction
Having operated in a sophisticated and highly competitive
environment, modern universities commonly seek to
analyze their performance, to identify their uniqueness
and to formulate a strategy from working experience and
knowledge [4]. The recent increase of learning resources,
educational software, databases of course and student
information having created large repositories of data [28].
This provides a goldmine that can be explored to under-
stand students’ learning behavior, preference and perfor-
mance [35]. In response, the application of data mining
(DM) methodology in education, also known as educa-
tional data mining (EDM), has been a fast-growing in-
terdisciplinary research field [3, 43]. Discovered
knowledge is highly useful to better understand how
students learn and effects of different settings to their
achievement. This can help to improve educational out-
comes and to gain insights into various educational
phenomena.
In the EDM literature, recent researches have focused on
understanding student categories and targeted marketing
[2, 44]. This is accomplished through, for instance, using
predictive modeling for maximizing student retention [60],
developing enrollment prediction models based on admis-
sion data [58], predicting student performance and dropout
[30, 40]. More specifically, if accurate predictors of aca-
demic performance can be obtained, they can be used to
gain understanding of success and risk factors with respect
to the curriculum [54]. Awareness of these issues by
educational staffs and management will help identifying
the risk group and determining the appropriate course of
measures. In other words, at-risk students would be pro-
vided with academic and administrative support to increase
the chance of staying on the course.
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According to the study of Tinto [52], student dropout is
a major problem in higher education with around one
fourth of students dropping college after their first year. It
is suggested that determinants of completion include stu-
dent’s family background, personal characteristics, and
prior academic performance. Most dropout studies address
the retention of first-year students [17, 39, 48], based on the
assumption that early detection of vulnerable students can
lead to the success of any retention strategy. To achieve
this, several predictive models have been designed using
different learning techniques, such as Naive Bayes [30], k-
means [10], and decision tree [26, 51]. Unfortunately, this
problem in Thai universities has attracted less attention,
with only a few investigations being conducted in recent
years. These include the social science studies at Prince of
Songkla University [47] and King Mongkut University of
Technology North Bangkok [50]. Yet, the model devel-
opment is limited in number, whilst restricted to the use of
conventional classifiers like decision tree and neural net-
works [29].
Besides the findings with benchmark techniques, the
tendency towards improving these predictive models with
feature discrimination has emerged lately [14, 31, 33, 40].
Regarding the observation of West et al. [56], a few of
available data features may account for much of the data
variation. With this characteristic, an effective prediction
may not be achieved due to the fact that any proximity or
similarity metric exploited by a classification model is
increasingly inaccurate as dimensionality increases [5]. To
deal with this problem, one may reduce dimension of the
data by selecting a subset of interesting variables; or
generating meta components (i.e., combinations of vari-
ables), which are widely known as feature selection and
transformation, respectively. Following these approaches
to dimensionality reduction, the classification procedure
has been re-shaped and comprises two steps of: data
preprocessing by dimensionality reduction; and the clas-
sification process, in which samples are classified into
categories by applying standard statistical or machine
learning models [37]. Dimensionality reduction tech-
niques transform data for sake of easier computation,
modeling and inference by analysis of variable interde-
pendence and interobject similarity [7]. On one hand,
feature selection algorithms try to search for the most
valuable feature subset heuristically under certain prede-
fined feature subset evaluation criterion [8]. On the other,
feature transformation methods like principal component
analysis (PCA) and kernel principal component analysis
(KPCA) transform original features into some new fea-
tures, which are probably difficult to interpret for human
beings [9]. According to the research of Luan and Zhao
[31], feature transformation is preferred for EDM. In
particular, some features may have little significance to
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Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
the overall prediction outcome, but they can be essential
to a specific observation [6, 15, 16].
This paper presents EDM models and results of the
project carried out at Mae Fah Luang University, Thailand.
The research work aims to disclose interesting patterns,
which could contribute to predicting student performance
and dropout, based on their pre-university characteristics,
admission details, and initial academic performance at
university. In particular, a new feature transformation
method is introduced to improve the accuracy of conven-
tional classifiers. This is achieved through the use of
ensemble-information matrix created by link-based
ensemble clustering (LCE; [22–24]). With respect to LCE,
the refined sample-cluster association matrix can be con-
sidered as the representation of samples in the transformed
space, which is discovered from multiple clusterings in the
setting of original features. The use of clustering infor-
mation in addition to the original feature has been recently
reported to improve the accuracy of intrusion detection
problem [38]. In particular, a fuzzy clustering technique is
applied to the data under examination, and the resulting
memberships of each sample to k clusters (where k is a
user-defined number of clusters) are used to form addi-
tional k variables or features for the following classification
step. Similar classification approaches of Nasierding et al.
[36] and Sang-Woon [45] have combined cluster labels and
conventional supervised algorithms for face recognition
and image annotation, respectively. The proposed approach
is largely different from the aforementioned clustering-
oriented methods, which make use of the result from a
single run of clustering technique. In contrary, this method
concentrates on transforming the original data to another
information matrix that represents associations within a
cluster ensemble.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
provides background knowledge of ensemble clustering as
to set the scene for the concepts and notations used
throughout the paper. Following that, Sect. 3 introduces the
ensemble-based data transformation framework, including
the generation of cluster ensemble and the ensemble-in-
formation matrix. Section 4 presents the description of data
related to the current study of students’ dropout. In addi-
tion, this section also includes the evaluation of the pro-
posed predictive model as compared to several
unsupervised transformation methods, using conventional
classification techniques. The paper is concluded in Sect. 5
with the perspective of future research.
2 Preliminary of cluster ensemble
Ensemble clustering or cluster ensemble has become an
attractive tool for analyzing modern data, such as those
Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
Fig. 1 Examples of a cluster ensemble, b label-assignment matrix, c pairwise similarity matrix and d binary cluster-association (BA) matrix.
Note that X ¼ fx1 ; . . .; x6 g, P ¼ fp1 ; p2 ; p3 ; p4 g, p1 ¼ fC11 ; C21 ; C31 g, p2 ¼ fC12 ; C22 g, p3 ¼ fC13 ; C23 g and p4 ¼ fC14 ; C24 ; C34 g
acquired from microarray experiments [22, 27]. This meta-
learning approach is motivated by the fact that the quality
of most conventional clustering techniques is highly data
dependent. Based on a number of published studies [13,
57], a clustering algorithm may create an acceptable out-
come on one dataset, but possibly becomes less accurate
with others. To resolve this, researchers and scientists have
commonly attempted to aggregate multiple standard clus-
terings into a single consensus decision, with possibly
higher quality than those initial data partitions. It is shown
across different domains that ensemble clustering can
provide more accurate and robust solutions [13, 22, 53].
Specific to this section, it is given to set the scene for
theoretical concepts and notations discussed throughout the
present work.
According to Iam-On et al. [22], the problem of
ensemble clustering is defined as follows. Let X ¼
fx1 ; . . .; xN g be a set of N data points or samples, where
each xi 2 X is represented by a vector of D feature or at-
tribute values, i.e., xi ¼ ðxi;1 ; . . .; xi;D Þ. Also, let P ¼
fp1 ; . . .; pM g be a cluster ensemble with M base cluster-
ings, each of which is referred to as an ensemble member.
Each base clustering returns a set of clusters
S kg g
pg ¼ fC1g ; C2g ; . . .; Ckgg g, such that t¼1 Ct ¼ X, where kg is
the number of clusters in the gth clustering. For each
xi 2 X, C g ðxi Þ denotes the cluster label in the gth base
clustering to which data point xi belongs, i.e., C g ðxi Þ ¼ ‘t’
(or ‘Ctg ’) if xi 2 Ctg . The problem is to find a new data
partition p ¼ C1 ; . . .; CK , where K denotes the number of
clusters in the final clustering result, of a data set X that
summarizes the information from the cluster ensemble P.
This meta-level methodology comprises three major tasks
of: (1) generating a cluster ensemble, (2) summarizing
ensemble-information into a form suitable for the follow-
ing analysis, and (3) producing the final partition, normally
referred to as a consensus clustering function.
Having obtained an ensemble of base clustering results,
a variety of consensus functions have been developed and
made available for generating the ultimate data partition.
Each consensus function utilizes a specific form of
ensemble-information matrix, which summarizes those
decisions of base clusterings. Based on the cluster ensem-
ble shown in Fig. 1a, three general types of such matrix can
be constructed. Firstly, the label-assignment matrix (see
Fig. 1b for an example), of size N  M, represents cluster
labels that are assigned to each sample by different base
clusterings. Next, the pairwise similarity matrix (e.g.,
Fig. 1c), of size N  N, summarizes co-occurrence statis-
tics amongst samples. And finally, the binary cluster-as-
sociation (BA) matrix, whose example is shown in Fig. 1d,
provides a cluster-specific view of the original label-as-
signment matrix. The association degree that one sample
belonging to a specific cluster is either 1 or 0. With these
representation schemes, different consensus functions
found in the literature make use of the aforementioned
matrices to create the final decision. They can be
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categorized into direct approach [12], feature-based ap-
proach [53], pairwise-similarity approach [13, 34], and
graph-based algorithms [11, 49], respectively.
3 Proposed method
The use of ensemble clustering as a new feature transfor-
mation method for data classification has not been exten-
sively investigated in the literature. This approach is
motivated by several studies in the recent years, which
enrich the original set of features with additional variables
acquired from a single data clustering [36, 38, 45]. In ad-
dition to their simplicity, these initial works have proven
effective for improving the accuracy of real classification
problems like face recognition and image annotation.
Given these observations, it is hypothesized that the use of
multiple clusterings may provide more useful information
to the classification process, as compared to the previous
exploitation of one data partition. This leads to a new
method to unsupervised feature transformation, through the
generation of ensemble-information matrix that can be
regarded as the deep-knowledge representation of the ori-
ginal counterpart. In particular, the framework adopts link-
based cluster ensemble (LCE) and includes two stages of:
(1) creating an ensemble P, and (2) aggregating base
clusterings, pg 2 P; g ¼ 1. . .M, into a meta-level data
matrix H. As such, the resulting matrix H can be used as an
input to any preferred classification model. Note that the
proposed method follows the initial attempt of using H
matrix for classification with numerical features Iam-On
and Boongoen [19]. Unlike the previous study where k-
means is employed as base clusterings, the current research
generates an ensemble of k-prototypes Huang [18] that is
effective for mixed-type numerical and categorical data
clustering, e.g., students’ performance related data.
3.1 Creating ensemble of clusterings
For the present study, the following two types of cluster
ensembles are investigated. Based on the original work of
LCE [22] and its application to mixed-type data analysis
[25], k-prototypes is used to form base clusterings, each of
which is initialized with a random set of cluster prototypes.
– Fixed-k Each clustering pg 2 P, is created using the
data set X 2 RND with all D attributes. The number of
pffiffiffiffi
clusters in each base clustering is fixed to k ¼ d N e.
To obtain a meaningful partition, k becomes 50 if
pffiffiffiffi
d N e [ 50.
– Random-k Each pg is created using the data set with all
attributes, and the number of clusters is randomly
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Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
pffiffiffiffi
selected between f2; . . .; d N eg. Note that both
‘Fixed-k’ and ‘Random-k’ generation strategies are
initially introduced in the primary work [21].
3.2 Aggregating multiple clustering results
Having acquired cluster ensemble P, the base clusterings
are summarized into an information matrix H 2 ½0; 1NP .
Note that P denotes the total number of clusters in the
ensemble under examination, i.e., P ¼ k1 þ . . . þ kg . For
each clustering pg 2 P and their corresponding clusters
C1g ; . . .; Ckgg , a matrix entry Hðxi ; clÞ that represents the
association degree between data point xi 2 X and each
cluster cl 2 fC1g ; . . .; Ckgg g, is estimated as follows:

1 if cl ¼ Cg ðxi Þ
Hðxi ; clÞ ¼ ; ð1Þ
simðcl; Cg ðxi ÞÞ otherwise
where Cg ðxi Þ is a cluster label to which data point xi has
been assigned. In addition, simðCx ; Cy Þ 2 ½0; 1 denotes the
similarity between any two clusters Cx ; Cy 2 pg , which can
be discovered using the link-based algorithms presented
next. Note that H can be considered as a refined variation
of a crisp BA matrix, in which an element can only be
either 1 or 0.
Weighted connected triple (WCT) algorithm [20–22]:
extends the Connected-Triple method [42] that has been
used to find ambiguous author names within a publication
repository. This is built for a social network represented as
an undirected graph G0 ¼ ðV; EÞ, where V is the set of
vertices each corresponding to an author name and E is the
set of unweighted edges each standing for a co-authorship
relation, respectively. With this representation scheme, the
similarity of vx ; vy 2 V is subjected to the number of
Connected-Triples (i.e., triples) they are part of. Formally,
a triple, Triple ¼ ðVTriple ; ETriple Þ, is a subgraph of G0 con-
taining three vertices VTriple ¼ fvx ; vy ; vk g  V and two
edges ETriple ¼ fexk ; eyk g  E, with exy 62 E. This simple
counting might be sufficient for any indivisible object, e.g.,
data point or author. However, in the case of clusters, it is
necessary to take into account the composite characteristic,
i.e., shared data members between clusters under
examination.
With this intuition, the WCT algorithm is established
upon a weighted graph G ¼ ðV; WÞ, where V is the set of
vertices each representing a cluster in P and W is a set of
weighted edges between clusters. The weight jwxy j 2 ½0; 1
assigned to the edge wxy 2 W, that connects vertices
vx ; vy 2 V (corresponding to clusters Cx ; Cy 2 P), is cal-
culated by:
Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.

jBx \ By j their contribution towards the similarity measure. It is in-

jwxy j ¼ ; ð2Þ spired by the initial metric of Adamic and Adar [1], which
jBx [ By j
is used to evaluate the association between personal home
where Bz  X denotes the set of data points belonging to a pages. In particular, features of the compared pages pa and
cluster Cz 2 P. Note that G is an undirected graph such pb are exploited to calculate their similarity score, i.e.,
that jwxy j ¼ jwyx j; 8vx ; vy 2 V. Given a weight graph, the scoreðpa ; pb Þ, as follows:
WCT measure of vx ; vy 2 V with respect to each center of a X 1
triple vz 2 V, is defined as scoreðpa ; pb Þ ¼ ; ð7Þ
log ðfreqðz ÞÞ
8zc 2Z c
z
WCTxy ¼ minðjwxz j; jwyz jÞ; ð3Þ
where Z is the set of features shared by home pages pa and
where jwxz j and jwyz j are weights of the edges wxz ; wyz 2 W pb , and freqðzd Þ represents the number of times feature zd
connecting vertices vx and vz , and vertices vy and vz , re- appearing in the studied set of pages. Note that the method
spectively. The summation of all triples ð1. . .kÞ between gives high weights to rare features and low weights to
vertices vx and vy can be found by the following equation. features that are common to most of the pages. Specific to
X
k WTQ, Eq. 7 has been modified to discriminate the quality
z of shared triples between a pair of vertices in question. To
WCTxy ¼ WCTxy ð4Þ
z¼1 this point, the quality of each vertex is determined by the
rarity of links connecting itself to other vertices in a net-
WCT algorithm can be summarized as follows:
work. With the aforementioned weighted graph
G ¼ ðV; WÞ, the WTQ measure of vertices vx ; vy 2 V with
ALGORITHM: WCT(G, Cx , Cy )
respect to each center of a triple vz 2 V, is designed as
G = (V, W ), a weighted graph, where Cx , Cy ∈ V ;
1
Nk ⊂ V, a set of adjacent neighbors of Ck ∈ V ; Cz ∈ Nk WTQzxy ¼ P ; ð8Þ
jwzt j
when |wkz | > 0; 8vt 2Nz

W CTxy , the WCT measure of Cx and Cy ; Here Nz  V denotes the set of vertices that is directly
linked to the vertex vz , such that 8vt 2 Nz ; jwzt j [ 0. The
(1) W CTxy ← 0
accumulative WTQ score from all triples ð1. . .kÞ between
(2) For each z ∈ Nx vertices vx and vy can be approximated by
(3) If z ∈ Ny
X
k
(4) W CTxy ← W CTxy + min(|wxz |, |wyz |) WTQxy ¼ WTQzxy ð9Þ
z¼1
(5) Return W CTxy
The WTQ algorithm is summarized next.
Following that, the similarity SWCT ðvx ; vy Þ between vx
and vy (or cluster Cx and Cy ) is defined as ALGORITHM: WTQ(G, Cx , Cy )

WCTxy G = (V, W ), a weighted graph, where Cx , Cy ∈ V ;

SWCT ðvx ; vy Þ ¼  DC; ð5Þ
WCTmax Nk ⊂ V, a set of adjacent neighbors of Ck ∈ V ;

with Wk = wtk ;
∀Ct ∈Nk
WCTmax ¼ max WCTpq ; ð6Þ W T Qxy , the WTQ measure of Cx and Cy ;
8vp ;vq 2V
(1) W T Qxy ← 0
where DC 2 ½0; 1 is a constant decay factor (i.e., confi-
dence level of accepting two non-identical clusters as being (2) For each z ∈ Nx
similar). With this similarity metric, SWCT ðvx ; vy Þ 2 ½0; 1 (3) If z ∈ Ny
with SWCT ðvx ; vx Þ ¼ 1, 8vx ; vy 2 V. It is also reflexive such (4) W T Qxy ← W T Qxy + 1
Wz
that SWCT ðvx ; vy Þ is equivalent to SWCT ðvy ; vx Þ. It is note-
(5) Return W T Qxy
worthy that the DC value around 0.8–0.9 is suggested by
Iam-On and Garrett [20], based on experiments with Then, the similarity SWTQ ðvx ; vy Þ between vertices vx and
simulated, UCI and published microarray data collections. vy is
Weighted triple quality (WTQ) algorithm [24]: aims to WTQxy
SWTQ ðvx ; vy Þ ¼  DC; ð10Þ
differentiate the significance of different triples and hence WTQmax

123

provided that
WTQmax ¼ max WTQpq ð11Þ
8vp ;vq 2V
Having achieved the transformed matrix H ¼ fx1 ; . . .; xN g
where xi ¼ fxi;1 ; . . .; xi;P g; i ¼ 1. . .N; it can be used to
create a classifier, provided that the ground truth or classes
of N data points are known. In other words, the matrix H
can be regarded as the input training set for a classification
algorithm such as C4.5 (Decision Tree) and Naive Bayes.
After the supervised-learning stage, the resulting classifier
can be exploited to categorize an unseen sample xu to one
of the pre-defined classes. Note that this new sample is
initially presented with the original D dimensions, i.e.,
xu ¼ fxu;1 ; . . .; xu;D g. Thus, it is necessary to transform the
aforementioned representation of xu to fxu;1 ; . . .; xu;P g,
which complies to that of the training set (H). To accom-
plish this, the knowledge of ensemble P and link-based
similarity measures are to be re-used here. Firstly, for each
clustering pg 2 P, the distances between xu and centroids
of all the clusters belonging to pg justify the crisp mem-
berships or associations that xu has with these examined
clusters. By repeating this for all clusterings in P, a BA-
alike representation of xu is created. Then, variables (cor-
responding to clusters) in the vector xu with ‘0’ values are
modified using the similarity amongst clusters that have
been found by the previous generation of H.
4 Application to student dropout prediction
This section presents the application of the proposed data-
transformation approach to student dropout prediction; and
the performance evaluation with different classification
models, in comparison to various unsupervised feature
transformation techniques.
4.1 Investigated educational dataset
The empirical study is conducted on the specific educa-
tional dataset obtained from the operational database sys-
tem at Mae Fah Luang University, Chiang Rai, Thailand. It
consists of 811 records each belonging to a specific student
who joined the university and graduated in the academic
year of 2009 and 2012, respectively. The initial fact ob-
served with this dataset is that 271 students (33.42 %)
dropout right after the first year or later. The proposed
model is designed for a binary-class prediction model
(Class1 = graduate, Class2 = dropout), which is to be
exploited in two contexts: (1) identification of graduate/-
dropout before starting the first-year study, and (2) identi-
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Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
fication of graduate/dropout after the first year in the
university. Table 1 summarizes 21 features used in this
empirical study, with respect to data type and involvement
in the aforementioned application contexts. In particular to
student’s gender, the dataset comprises 253 male and 558
female, who are originally from 72 different home pro-
vinces. Their university entries can be categorized into four
types of RQ (Regional Quota), DA (Direct Admission),
ADA (Additional Direct Admission), and CA (Conditional
Admission, with school GPAX above 2.0). The number of
students belonging to these types are 222 of RQ, 393 of
DA, 178 of ADA, and 18 of CA. This dataset cover stu-
dents from 26 academic departments of Mae Fah Luang
University, e.g., Law, Business Administration, Informa-
tion Technology, Nursing Science, and Public Health.
In addition to the aforementioned four nominal features,
there are 17 numerical variables included in this ex-
amination. Five of these represent student’s prior-univer-
sity academic capability: the overall grade (S-GPAX) and
average grades across four subject groups (S-GPA1, S-
GPA2, S-GPA3 and S-GPA4). The other 12 features that
are applicable only to the second problem context, regard
student’s performance in the first year. These are encoded
as ratios of different grades achieved from a collection of
registered subjects. Note that the academic assessment is
subjected to two grading systems: (a) 8-level setting, i.e.,
A, B? and so on, and (b) 2-level setting, i.e. S (Satisfied)
and U (Unsatisfied). Let Si be the total number of subjects
taken by the ith student in the first year, Si ¼ Sai þ Sbi , given
that Sai and Sbi denote the number of subjects with 8-level
and 2-level assessment systems, respectively. The student’s
ratio of subject with grade r 2 fA; Bþ; B; Cþ; C;
Dþ; D; Fg, RTir , is estimated by
ri
RTir ¼ a ; ð12Þ
Si
where ri 2 f0; . . .; Sai g is the number of subjects with grade
r obtained by student i. Likewise, the student’s ratio of
subject with grade t 2 fS; Ug, RTit , is defined as
ti
RTit ¼ ; ð13Þ
Sbi
here ti 2 f0; . . .; Sbi g is the number of subjects with grade t
obtained by student i. In addition, the ratio of withdrawn
subject is
Wi
RTiW ¼ ; ð14Þ
Si
given that Wi 2 f0; . . .; Si g is the number of subjects
withdrawn by student i. Table 2 illustrates statistical details
for each of these numerical features, in terms of value
range, maximum, minimum and mean values.
Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.

Table 1 Description of Feature Data type Context 1 Context 2 Description

investigated dataset, with
Context 1 and Context 2 Gender Nominal Applicable Applicable Student’s gender
denoting two problem contexts
Province Nominal Applicable Applicable Name of student’s home province
of before- and after-first-year
prediction Type Nominal Applicable Applicable Student’s type of university entry
Department Nominal Applicable Applicable Student’s academic department
S-GPAX Numerical Applicable Applicable Student’s school grade (overall)
S-GPA1 Numerical Applicable Applicable Student’s school grade (subject type1)
S-GPA2 Numerical Applicable Applicable Student’s school grade (subject type2)
S-GPA3 Numerical Applicable Applicable Student’s school grade (subject type3)
S-GPA4 Numerical Applicable Applicable Student’s school grade (subject type4)
GPAX Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s university grade
A Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade A
B? Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade B?
B Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade B
C? Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade C?
C Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade C
D? Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade D?
D Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade D
F Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade F
S Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade S
U Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of subject with grade U
W Ratio Numerical n/a Applicable Student’s ratio of withdrawn subject
n/a not applicable

Table 2 Statistical details of numerical features Details of these algorithms are not provided due to the
Feature Range Max Min Mean available space.1

S-GPAX [0.00–4.00] 3.96 1.98 3.06

– PCA, Principle component analysis
S-GPA1 [0.00–4.00] 4.00 1.60 3.09
– KPCA, Kernel principle component analysis
S-GPA2 [0.00–4.00] 4.00 0.75 2.62
– LPP, Locality preserving projection [16]
– NPE, Neighborhood preserving embedding [15]
S-GPA3 [0.00–4.00] 4.00 0.00 2.78
– IsoP, Isometric projection [6]
S-GPA4 [0.00–4.00] 4.00 0.00 3.17
GPAX [0.00–4.00] 4.00 0.00 2.36 Additional experimental settings are exhibited below:
A ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.12 – For the proposed models that will be referred to as
B? ratio [0.00–1.00] 0.64 0.00 0.15 WCT-T and WTQ-T, k-prototypes is employed to
B ratio [0.00–1.00] 0.67 0.00 0.17 create M base clusterings, each with a random value of
C? ratio [0.00–1.00] 0.67 0.00 0.16 c 2 ½0:1; 1. In addition, the value of DC is set to 0.9 for
C ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.14 the generation of data-transformation matrix, with the
D? ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.09 target ensemble size M 2 f10; 20; . . .; 50g. For each
D ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.08 dataset, the generation of ensemble and corresponding
F ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.08 matrix is repeated for 20 trials.
S ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.63 – Four conventional techniques decision tree (C4.5),
U ratio [0.00–1.00] 1.00 0.00 0.19 Naive Bayes, KNN (K = 1, K = 2 and K = 3) and
W ratio [0.00–1.00] 0.67 0.00 0.02 artificial neural network (ANN) are used to generate
classification models from the original and investigated
data matrices. As for ANN, the back-propagation
algorithm is used to train the networks, with weights/
4.2 Experimental design bias values being initialized to small random values

A collection of compared methods includes BA that can 1

Overview and implementation of these dimensionality reduction
be considered as the baseline model of the proposed methods in Matlab are available at http://www.cad.zju.edu.cn/home/
methods, and the following well-known techniques. dengcai/Data/DimensionReduction.html.

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 Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.

(between 0.001 and 0.0001) and the hidden layer size
of 10. The learning rate and momentum are set to 0.05
and 0.01, respectively. The training process stops after
2000 iterations, or when a mean squared error term
drops below 0.001. Given a data matrix, 10-fold cross
validation is specifically exploited to determine the
classification error rate 2 ½0; 1, where error rate of 0
indicates the most accurate case with no false positive
nor false negative.
4.3 Experimental results
Table 3 presents the results of different classification
models in the first application context, i.e., prediction of
dropout at the beginning of the first-year study. Without
actual students’ performance at the university, this can be
considered as a difficult task with most of the conventional
techniques having the error rate around 0.5 or so. Both
WCT-T and WTQ-T usually deliver the lowest error fig-
ures across six classifiers under examination. With more
refined information matrices, the proposed methods appear
to be more accurate than the use of conventional BA.
According to the table, the combination of WCT-T (Ran-
dom-k) and ANN provides the accurate predictive model,
with the error rate of 0.09 (i.e., the accuracy level of 91 %).
According to Fig. 2 that illustrates the transformation
technique-specific error rates (averages across six classi-
fiers), all transformation methods commonly improve the
accuracy obtained on the original data, with the four
ensemble-based matrices appearing to be the most effec-
tive. In addition, the results also suggest that PCA is more
accurate among the rest.
Table 4 shows the results with respect to classifica-
tion task at the end of the first-year study. As compared
to the former, the second problem context is less diffi-
cult with addition performance related features. These
variables appear to be informative towards the predic-
tion of student dropout, given that the error rates with
original data matrix become generally less than 0.2.
Again, the data matrices generated by WCT-T and
WTQ-T often provide lower error rates than the other
transformation techniques. The most accurate model is
the combination of WCT-T (Fixed-k) and ANN, which
reaches the error rate of 0.06 (i.e., the accuracy level of
94 %). Similar to the assessment framework presented
in Fig. 2, it is shown in Fig. 3 that only the ensemble-
based techniques can consistently improve the accuracy
obtained with the original data. Note that the perfor-
mance of PCA is comparable to the use of original data
matrix, while the rest can not achieve the expected
improvement. In fact, their accuracies are much lower
than that of the original counterpart. For the first
problem context where available features do not largely
correlate with the predictive outcomes, the projection of
original data onto random planes or spaces can provide
alternative interpretations that are usually useful to
classification modeling. This is shown with the results
of using different data transformation techniques with
the first problem context. However, as a lot more in-
formative features being included in the second context,
the aforementioned random embedding may not lead to
the same observation. Hence, several methods assessed
in this experiment fail to match the quality initially
acquired from original features. Unlike PCA and alike
models discussed previously, WCT-T and WTQ-T op-
erate in the original data space that is later transformed
to data point-cluster associations. Regarding the second
problem contexts, those informative variables are pre-
served and used to deliver a better data clustering, thus

Table 3 The results with Problem Context 1: classification error rates of the original data matrix and nine different data transformation
techniques, with the corresponding standard deviation given in parenthesis
Transformation technique C4.5 Naive Bayes KNN (K = 1) KNN (K = 2) KNN (K = 3) ANN

Original Data 0.499 (0.011) 0.476 (0.006) 0.495 (0.006) 0.492 (0.009) 0.468 (0.006) 0.503 (0.030)
PCA 0.113 (0.004) 0.109 (0.001) 0.178 (0.002) 0.187 (0.003) 0.167 (0.002) 0.108 (0.011)
KPCA 0.346 (0.006) 0.403 (0.002) 0.346 (0.003) 0.336 (0.002) 0.325 (0.002) 0.305 (0.007)
LPP 0.340 (0.004) 0.409 (0.002) 0.343 (0.004) 0.335 (0.006) 0.325 (0.003) 0.303 (0.006)
NPE 0.338 (0.006) 0.319 (0.002) 0.355 (0.003) 0.340 (0.005) 0.325 (0.004) 0.302 (0.010)
IsoP 0.340 (0.004) 0.318 (0.001) 0.357 (0.004) 0.339 (0.003) 0.323 (0.003) 0.301 (0.004)
BA 0.118 (0.007) 0.120 (0.009) 0.134 (0.005) 0.136 (0.007) 0.130 (0.008) 0.101 (0.008)
WCT-T (fixed-k) 0.109 (0.005) 0.092 (0.004) 0.119 (0.007) 0.114 (0.004) 0.099 (0.006) 0.096 (0.017)
WCT-T (random-k) 0.104 (0.005) 0.091 (0.007) 0.126 (0.005) 0.115 (0.004) 0.103 (0.003) 0.090 (0.003)
WTQ-T (fixed-k) 0.110 (0.005) 0.098 (0.005) 0.120 (0.005) 0.114 (0.004) 0.100 (0.006) 0.094 (0.007)
WTQ-T (random-k) 0.106 (0.004) 0.094 (0.005) 0.126 (0.007) 0.117 (0.005) 0.104 (0.004) 0.101 (0.016)
These are obtained using 10-fold cross validation. The two lowest error rates on each investigated classifier are highlighted in boldface

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Fig. 2 Error rates of different

transformation techniques for
the first problem context, as the
averages across six
classification models

Table 4 The results with Problem Context 2: classification error rates of the original data matrix and nine different data transformation
techniques, with the corresponding standard deviation given in parenthesis
Transformation technique C4.5 Naive Bayes KNN (K = 1) KNN (K = 2) KNN (K = 3) ANN

Original Data 0.095 (0.006) 0.085 (0.002) 0.191 (0.004) 0.184 (0.007) 0.173 (0.004) 0.087 (0.021)
PCA 0.116 (0.006) 0.102 (0.003) 0.172 (0.005) 0.186 (0.006) 0.172 (0.005) 0.077 (0.023)
KPCA 0.296 (0.009) 0.518 (0.005) 0.288 (0.005) 0.287 (0.010) 0.298 (0.007) 0.336 (0.012)
LPP 0.323 (0.018) 0.407 (0.005) 0.291 (0.008) 0.296 (0.004) 0.300 (0.009) 0.326 (0.036)
NPE 0.335 (0.005) 0.409 (0.006) 0.341 (0.006) 0.323 (0.007) 0.322 (0.005) 0.317 (0.014)
IsoP 0.334 (0.008) 0.407 (0.004) 0.342 (0.008) 0.326 (0.008) 0.324 (0.009) 0.320 (0.015)
BA 0.092 (0.009) 0.088 (0.007) 0.119 (0.007) 0.108 (0.004) 0.100 (0.006) 0.089 (0.009)
WCT-T (fixed-k) 0.079 (0.009) 0.063 (0.005) 0.094 (0.009) 0.073 (0.007) 0.067 (0.006) 0.060 (0.006)
WCT-T (random-k) 0.074 (0.009) 0.072 (0.005) 0.103 (0.013) 0.076 (0.005) 0.069 (0.004) 0.074 (0.019)
WTQ-T (fixed-k) 0.078 (0.008) 0.062 (0.003) 0.097 (0.010) 0.073 (0.006) 0.064 (0.007) 0.073 (0.014)
WTQ-T (random-k) 0.075 (0.006) 0.073 (0.006) 0.105 (0.010) 0.078 (0.006) 0.069 (0.005) 0.072 (0.023)
These are obtained using 10-fold cross validation. The two lowest error rates on each investigated classifier are highlighted in boldface

resulting in lower error rates shown throughout this
experimental report. As the examined dataset is imbal-
anced, in term of class distribution; it is important to
investigate the performance with respect to each of the
two classes. Specific to this point, Figs. 4 and 5 shows
the average error rates, across six classifiers, for the first
and the second problem context, respectively. These
results suggest that the proposed methods are marginally
more effective at predicting a dropout case than the
other. They are generally robust to this binary problem,
as compared to other techniques.
In addition to the previous findings, it is also important
to investigate the effect of algorithmic parameter on the
performance of the proposed method. The important vari-
able of WCT-T and WTQ-T that may influence the
resulting classification model, is the size of ensemble (M).
With respect to WCT-T (Fixed-k), Figs. 6 and 7 summa-
rize the associations between classification error rates and
ensemble sizes (M 2 f10; 20; . . .; 50g), for the first prob-
lem context. According to these statistics, all classifiers
become more accurate as the size of M increases. On the
other hand, based on the results shown in Figs. 8 and 9,
such an improvement is not as obvious with the second
problem context. In the former case where the accuracy of
data clustering is not certain, the quality of ensemble can
be enhanced with a large number of diversed members. On
the other hand, base clusterings created from informative
data are highly duplicated, thus the ensemble size becomes
less significant. Note that similar findings have been ob-
served with the other ensemble-based techniques.

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 Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.

Fig. 3 Error rates of different

transformation techniques for
the second problem context, as
the averages across six
classification models

Fig. 4 Error rates of different transformation techniques for the first Fig. 5 Error rates of different transformation techniques for the
problem context, with respect to each class second problem context, with respect to each class

Based on the previous findings, WCT-T and WTQ-T are
useful as a preprocessing tool for any classification model.
They usually provide improved accuracy and robust algo-
rithmic variable setting. These methods are based similarly
on two stages of: creating an ensemble of M base clus-
terings and summarizing the ensemble as a refined infor-
mation matrix. The time complexity can be defined as the
pffiffiffiffi
summation of these stages, OðM N NDÞ þ OðNP þ P2 Þ.
As for the first stage, the complexity is subjected to the
ensemble size M and that of k-prototypes; OðkNDÞ, with
pffiffiffiffi
the number of clusters k  N in this research. The com-
plexity of the second stage is that for the creation of refined
matrix (of size N  P) and the pairwise estimation of WCT
or WTQ similarity among P clusters. Note that P can be
pffiffiffiffi
simplified as M N , where the number of clusters in M
pffiffiffiffi
clusterings of the target ensemble is  N .
5 Conclusion
This paper has proposed a new data transformation model,
which is built upon the summarized data matrix of link-
based cluster ensembles (LCE). Like several existing di-
mension reduction techniques such as PCA and KPCA, this
method aims to achieve high classification accuracy by
transforming the original data to a new form. The use of

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Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.

Fig. 6 Error rates of WCT-T

(Fixed-k) for problem context 1,
with respect to different
ensemble sizes (M) and
classifiers

Fig. 7 Error rates of WCT-T

(Fixed-k) for problem context 1,
with respect to different
ensemble sizes (M) and
classifiers

Fig. 8 Error rates of WCT-T

(Fixed-k) for problem context 2,
with respect to different
ensemble sizes (M) and
classifiers

123

Fig. 9 Error rates of WCT-T
(Fixed-k) for problem context 2,
with respect to different
ensemble sizes (M) and
classifiers
cluster ensembles for such a purpose is novel, with works
found in the literature thus far concentrate on stacking a
single clustering result with original variables, and then
feed this combination to the classification process. Ac-
cording to the empirical findings conducted on two dif-
ferent application contexts of student dropout prediction,
the proposed method perform better than several state-of-
the-art dimensionality reduction techniques. Also, this
performance is robust to the setting of algorithmic pa-
rameter. Instead of projecting the original data onto any
random or subjective space, WCT-T and WTQ-T simply
provide another interpretation of the examined data, in
terms of cluster-wise relations. This transformation makes
use of the initial variables to disclose proximity and data
clustering, without dropping or mapping them onto new
meta-features. With the strategy, information lost in
transformation can thus be avoided.
The common limitation of these new techniques is the
demanding time complexity, such that it may not scale up
well to a very large dataset. Whilst WCT-T and WTQ-T
are not quite for a highly time-critical application, they can
be an attractive candidate for those quality-led works, such
as the identification of those students at risk of under-
achievement. To further improve the dropout predictive
model, other information types regarding students’ family
and university-activity involvement may be also examined.
To this end, the application of different clustering tech-
niques [32, 41, 59] for ensemble generation is to be in-
vestigated. In addition, the future research also includes the
approximation framework for those ensemble-based
methods, which may reduce the underlying complexity and
boost their applicability to a wider range of data size.
Another alternative may be the use of more efficient base
clustering such as that proposed by Sarma et al. [46]. Re-
cently, the use of data clustering to prepare multiple folds
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Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber.
of data for classifier ensembles has been introduced by
Verma and Rahman [55]. This has inspired the on-going
work, which aims to examine the application of WCT-T
and WTQ-T in such a context.
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