Classifying the student academic performance with high accuracy facilitates admission decisions and enhances educational services at educational institutions. The purpose of this paper is to present a neuro-fuzzy approach for classifying students into different groups. The neuro-fuzzy classifier used previous exam results and other related factors as input variables and labeled students based on their expected academic performance. The results showed that the proposed approach achieved a high accuracy. The results were also compared with those obtained from other well-known classification approaches, including support vector machine, Naive Bayes, neural network, and decision tree approaches. The comparative analysis indicated that the neuro-fuzzy approach performed better than the others. It is expected that this work may be used to support student admission procedures and to strengthen the services of educational institutions. 1. Introduction Accurately predicting student performance is useful in many different contexts in educational environments. When admission officers review applications, accurate predictions help them to distinguish between suitable and unsuitable candidates for an academic program. The failure to perform an accurate admission decision may result in an unsuitable candidate being admitted to the university. Since the quality of an educational institution is mainly reflected in its research and training, the quality of admitted candidates affects the quality level of an institution. Accurate prediction enables educational managers to improve student academic performance by offering students additional support such as customized assistance and tutoring resources. The results of prediction can also be used by lecturers to specify the most suitable teaching actions for each group of students and provide them with further assistance tailored to their needs. Thus, accurate prediction of student achievement is one way to enhance quality and provide better educational services. As a result, the ability to predict students’ academic performance is important for educational institutions. A very promising tool to achieve this objective is the use of data mining. Data mining processes large amounts of data to discover hidden patterns and relationships that support decision-making. Data mining in higher education is forming a new research field called educational data mining [1, 2]. The application of data mining to education allows educators to discover new and useful knowledge about students [3]. Educational data mining develops techniques
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