Introduction

Through the recent years, research has been acknowledged as one of the most powerful tools
used in seeking out certain predicaments and utilizing a methodology that will provide solutions and will
test researcher’s hypothesis. Experts around the world are also focused in developing researchers
academically. One on which is the article being written by Yadav et al. entitled “Data Mining
Applications: A comparative Study for Predicting Students Performance”. This article introduced the
importance of Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) and terminologies related. Also, the research
paper discussed clearly the factors influencing students’ academic performance through Educational
Data Mining. Moreover, the author stated different studies conducted to show comparative analysis to
the readers and briefly expanded the meaning of Decision tree and algorithms.

Analysis

One of the methods used by the author is descriptive method. Details were relatively discussed
in descriptive form. It can also be identified as a quantitative research because data statistics were
presented and involved in the latter part of the article. The design of the study is very meticulous
because the author explained in details all the information needed together with the data collected
from previous related studies. The participants of the researched studies involved schools and
universities in India, Pakistan, and Jordan. In the study of Bhardwaj and Pal, participants are 300
students from 5 different colleges in India where in it was found out that factors involved in Academic
performance are student grades in senior secondary exam, living location, medium of teaching,
mothers’ qualification, students’ other habits, family income, and students’ family status. It is also
similar with the study of Hijazi and Naqvi. Same variables were used; however, attendance of students
and linear regression analysis were added by Hijazi. On the other hand, Khan conducted the research to
200 boys and 200 girls from Aligarh University India and used cluster sampling base on the gender and
interests of the students; it was found out that girls with socio-economic status had relatively higher
academic achievement in Science. However, Z.J Kovacic used two algorithms: the CHAID and CART that
stated students’ behavior predicts the results of their academic performance. Another different method
was made use by Al-Radaideh, this study indicated that Decision tree model had better prediction than
other models. Same with the technique used by Khan Ayesha et al, it also used clustering. Panday and
Pal also selected 60 students from Awadh University and found out that by means of associating the
rule, teaching of language has an effect to the interest of students in opting classes. However, Bray
mentioned in his study that students who are having private tutorials in India had relatively higher
results than in Malaysia, Singapore, Japan China and Sri Lanka.

The study of Baradwaj and Pal should be rearranged because the author was mentioned again
but with different details, where in fact, the study was already mentioned 2nd to the review of related
study. Another statement was presented by the author on the 10th paragraph. With this, readers will be
confused. Also, there is no clear flow of the content in the second part of the article background and
related works; each paragraph must be related to the next paragraph and the writer must be able to
connect the first study to the next study and provide a synthesis to the readers comparing the similarities
and differences of the researched studies. Furthermore, Public sector educational institutions are not
mentioned in the article. In a research, it is also an important to use local and foreign literatures and studies to know
if such hypothesis can occur in different environments or geographic areas. Most of the gathered researched study
were conducted in India. To me, this is one of the weaknesses of this article because the writer limited the review
of related studies which focused on private schools only and multiple studies were in India.

After indicating the different related studies, the article clearly explained the decision tree and
different algorithm and data mining processes together with domain values and variables. Data were all
clearly presented through statistical and graphical form that can easily be understand by the readers.
Tables are also well analyzed and interpreted. Conditions and rules were presented to show the
correlation of making conditional statements in data mining. The good thing about the article is that it
also explained a user graphical tool which is called Weka that can be used for Data Mining. At the latter
part of the article, the writer mentioned the relevance of the techniques in data mining and how it can
impact the students’ academic performance.

The result of the study shows that medium of teaching, mother’s qualification, students’ other
habit, family annual income, personality and demographic variables, and student’s family status were
highly correlated with the student academic performance. The most frequently used decision tree
algorithms are ID3, C4.5 and CART. The experimental results show that CART is the best algorithm for
classification of data.

Conclusion

The paper makes a good effort in expanding the importance of data mining techniques over a
huge volume of data produced by other variables and methods involved. One of the critical components
intricate in this process is characterizing properly the Decision Tree methods. The paper clearly indicates
that data mining is indeed relevant in promoting students’ performance and identifying the elements,
rule sets and methodology related to it. Also, the author had a good point of presenting data visually
through graphs and tables.

For further improvement, the author can consider more software that can be used for Data
Mining and present relative samples and screenshots of the system. Also, add up-to-date related review
of literature and studies to catch up with the advancements of the millennial era.

As a teacher, data mining will have a big impact in the academe through extraction of data to
apply necessary methodology in teaching based on the students’ variables. Furthermore, the school
administrator can design the module based on students’ learning capacity and capability or can
conceptualize schemes for student learning improvement. I highly recommend this article for future or
any related studies.
Furthermore, the prurpose of this article