Merging decision trees: A case study in predicting student performance

Predicting the failure of students in university courses can provide useful information for course and programme managers as well as to explain the drop out phenomenon. While it is important to have models at course level, their number makes it hard to extract knowledge that can be useful at the university level. Therefore, to support decision making at this level, it is important to generalize the knowledge contained in those models. We propose an approach to group and merge interpretable models in order to replace them with more general ones without compromising the quality of predictive performance. We evaluate our approach using data from the U. Porto. The results obtained are promising, although they suggest alternative approaches to the problem. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.