Prediction of new student admissions to higher education using support vector machines

Abstract

Higher education institutions across various regions operate using systems that generate large amounts of data. This data is stored and utilized for strategic decision-making, providing significant business value to these institutions. Support vector machine (SVM) has become popular due to its strong generalization capability, high prediction accuracy, and faster training speed. SVM employs kernels as tuning parameters. This study aims to enhance the accuracy of student admissions prediction in higher education institutions using the SVM classification model. The SVM model was applied to a dataset comprising 5,936 records with four attributes and was evaluated using the use training set, 10-fold cross-validation, and percentage splits of 70%–30% and 80%–20%. Initially, the SVM-kernel model achieved high accuracy but failed to identify any true positive instances, indicating its inability to detect the minority “not accepted” class due to severe class imbalance. After applying class balancing techniques, the model’s performance improved significantly in terms of area under the curve (AUC), F-measure, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), reflecting a more balanced classification between majority and minority classes. The SVM with Pearson VII function-based universal kernel (PUK) and classifier version 4.5 (C4.5) models achieved the best performance, indicating that class balancing effectively enhances both sensitivity and fairness in predictive classification.