Ensemble Machine Learning Model for Higher Learning Scholarship Award Decisions

The role of higher learning in Malaysia is to ensure high quality educational ecosystems in developing individual potentials to fulfill the national aspiration. To implement this role with success, scholarship offer is an important part of strategic plan. Since the increasing number of undergraduates’ student every year, the government must consider to apply a systematic strategy to manage the scholarship offering to ensure the scholarship recipient must be selected in effective way. The use of predictive model has shown effective can be made. In this paper, an ensemble knowledge model is proposed to support the scholarship award decision made by the organization. It generates list of eligible candidates to reduce human error and time taken to select the eligible candidate manually. Two approached of ensemble are presented. Firstly, ensembles of model and secondly ensembles of rule-based knowledge. The ensemble learning techniques, namely, boosting, bagging, voting and rules-based ensemble technique and five base learners’ algorithm, namely, J48, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neuron Network (ANN), Naïve Bayes (NB) and Random Tree (RT) are used to develop the model. Total of 87,000 scholarship application data are used in modelling process. The result on accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure measurement shows that the ensemble voting techniques gives the best accuracy of 86.9% compare to others techniques. This study also explores the rules obtained from the rules-based model J48 and Apriori and managed to select the best rules to develop an ensemble rules-based models which is improved the study for classification model for scholarship award.

@article{Ahmad2020,
  title     = {Ensemble Machine Learning Model for Higher Learning Scholarship Award Decisions},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {11},
  number    = {5},
  year      = {2020},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Wirawati Dewi Ahmad and Azuraliza Abu Bakar},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110540},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2020.0110540}
}