Open Access
ARTICLE
Who Will Come: Predicting Freshman Registration Based on Decision Tree
Lei Yang1, Li Feng1, *, Liwei Tian1, Hongning Dai1
1 Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau.
* Corresponding Author: Li Feng. Email: .
Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 65(2), 1825-1836. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010011
Received 04 February 2020; Accepted 30 May 2020; Issue published 20 August 2020
Abstract
The registration rate of freshmen has been a great concern at many colleges
and universities, particularly private institutions. Traditionally, there are two inquiry
methods: telephone and tuition-payment-status. Unfortunately, the former is not only
time-consuming but also suffers from the fact that many students tend to keep their
choices secret. On the other hand, the latter is not always feasible because only few
students are willing to pay their university tuition fees in advance. It is often believed that
it is impossible to predict incoming freshmen’s choice of university due to the large
amount of subjectivity. However, if we look at the two major considerations a potential
freshman contemplates in making a choice, such as the geographical location of the
university in relation to his/her home town, and testimonies about of that college life
experience by previous graduates, we believe it is possible to predict future enrollment
decisions. This paper is the first to find a way to solve the problem of predicting the
choice of university a freshman will attend. Our contributions include the following: 1.
we present a dataset on freshman registration; 2. we propose a decision-tree-based
approach for freshman registration prediction. Study results show that freshman
registration is predictable.
Keywords
Cite This Article
L. Yang, L. Feng, L. Tian and H. Dai, "Who will come: predicting freshman registration based on decision tree,"
Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 65, no.2, pp. 1825–1836, 2020. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010011