Recommending degree studies according to students' attitudes in high school by means of subgroup discovery

The transition from high school to university is a critical step and many students head toward failure just because their final degree option was not the right choice. Both students' preferences and skills play an important role in choosing the degree that best fits them, so an analysis of these attitudes during the high school can minimize the drop out in a posteriori learning period like university. We propose a subgroup discovery algorithm based on grammars to extract itemsets and relationships that represent any type of homogeneity and regularity in data from a supervised context. This supervised context is cornerstone, considering a single item or a set of them as interesting and distinctive. The proposed algorithm supports the students' final degree decision by extracting relations among different students' skills and preferences during the high school period. The idea is to be able to provide advices with regard to what is the best degree option for each specific skill and student. In this regard, the use of grammars is essential since it enables subjective and external knowledge to be included during the mining process. The proposed algorithm has been compared against different subgroup discovery algorithms, achieving excellent results. A real-world experimental analysis has been developed at King Abdulaziz University, one of the most important universities in Saudi Arabia, where there is a special interest in introducing models to understand the students' skills to guide them accordingly.