Predicting Instructor Performance by Feature Selection and Machine Learning Methods

Today, increasing amount of data in all sector of life, make data mining more popular, and high amount of data in increasing complexity demanded to acquit. Different methods developed day by day, for solving problems at many sectors like finance, health, defense, and education, applied to data mining for many social, economic, and scientific issues. In the education area, where both number of instructors and students always increase, for enhancing system performance, it is needed to observe and evaluate the performance of students and instructors and such situation causes to reveal a new concept Educational Data Mining. Research in this area generally focuses on student performance. Thus, there is a need for research in instructor performance. Research using machine learning combined with attribute selection in the field of educational data mining have focused on student performance in general, but few studies have focused on instructor performance. In this paper, it was discussed how the performance of the instructor can be determined by educational data mining methods. A Likert type questionnaire dataset on opinions of the Gazi University’s student regarding their instructor’s teaching performance is used in this research and different feature reduction, and machine learning algorithms are used for evaluating the data set and performances of instructors. According to the obtained results, it has been revealed that the feature selection with genetic algorithm gives the best result for the used data set compared to the other methods and 19 attributes can be used instead of 33 attributes. Utilizing genetic algorithm and deep learning as a machine learning method has achieved a predictive accuracy performance of 97.70 %, which is higher than the value that can be achieved by using all the attributes. This study differs from the others in that it combines the reduced number of attributes and machine learning, as well as the ordering of instructor performances in concrete terms.