Factors Affecting Decision to Study in Bachelor’s Degree of Faculty of Business Administrator and Liberal Art Using Feature Selection and Data Mining Techniques

Abstract

The objective of this research was to study the factors affecting the decision to study at the bachelor's degree level, Faculty of Business Administration and Liberal Arts and to compare the effectiveness of data mining techniques. Based on the basic information on student recruitment for academic and registration of Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Chiang Mai, during the academic year 2020 - 2022, there were a total of 2,509 applicants. The research team has brought the data for factor analysis using feature selection and data mining techniques. The feature selection techniques used consisted of 3 techniques, namely 1) Chi Square Statistic, 2) Correlation Based, and 3) Information Gain. The data mining techniques used consisted of 6 techniques, namely 1) Decision Tree, 2) Random Forest, 3) Gradient Boosting Tree, 4) Naïve Bayes, 5) Logistic Regression and 6) Voting. The findings revealed that the factors that most affected the decision to study in the bachelor's degree from all techniques of qualification selection were: Selected field of study or course, original course and original qualifications. The technique with the highest accuracy in forecasting was the Voting technique with an accuracy of 73.44%, with a higher accuracy than the Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes and Gradient Boosting Tree, whose accuracies were 71.45%, 71.05%, 68.26%, 65.60%, 64.81%, respectively.