# Student Dropout Prediction for University with High Precision and Recall
## 3 Data Characteristics  
### Primitive Statistics on Data  
We acquired the student records of Gyeongsang National University from the year 2016 to 2022. After sanitizing the data, the total number of students we used for the experiment was 67,060. Note that the university acquires consent to utilize the data when the students are admitted to the university. To protect the students' privacy, we performed data anonymization to sanitize the sensitive information before analyzing the data. The university is located in the southern region of South Korea and is one of nine Flagship National Universities of South Korea. It has 14 colleges and 375 departments. The number of students registered at the university sums up to about 13,549. Every year, about 3266 students are matriculated and about 3303 students graduate from the university. Table 1 shows the summary of the total number of students, the number of students enrolled, and the number of students who dropped out of the university during that year. The average dropout rate during the five years was 5.1%. Table 2 further distinguishes students by academic year, the female and male ratio of students, and the dropout ratio. It shows that the university has, on average, 23% more male students than female students each academic year. It shows that male students tend to break away from the university more than female students. The data show that, on average, 131% more male students drop out of the university for various reasons. It also shows that freshmen drop out of the university the most (7.2%) and seniors drop out the least (2.1%). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Year**} & **Total No. of** & **No. of Enrolled** & **No. of** & \\  & **Students** & **Students** & **Dropouts** & **Ratio** \\ \hline
2016 & 15,667 & 15,038 & 629 & 4.1\% \\
2017 & 14,932 & 14,220 & 712 & 5\% \\
2018 & 14,662 & 13,822 & 840 & 6\% \\
2019 & 15,276 & 14,572 & 762 & 5.2\% \\
2020 & 14,771 & 14,146 & 742 & 5.2\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The Total Number of Students and the Number of Students Dropped Out During Year 2016–2020. Table 3 shows the ratio of dropouts living near the university and students from other provinces. In general, the number of students from other provinces is more than that of students living in the same province. The number of students dropping out of the university from other provinces gradually decreases, but the number stays almost indifferent in all years. From the data, we can deduce that the administrators have to take care of the first- and second-year students more than the junior and senior students. It is also advisable to take different approaches in counseling students in the different academic years. Table 4 describes the reasons the freshmen gave before dropping out of the university. About 54% of the students answered that they were admitted to another university. It means the student has been preparing for the entrance exam for about a year. The second most frequent reason was that the student was going through hard times or could not continue due to various family affairs. Although the students are categorized as dropouts, their academic performance may vary significantly. For example, the students admitted to another university may have positive course grades, and those who did not register may have negative course grades. The data show that the number of students dropping out of university is a minor class. Identifying a small number of students who are about to drop out accurately is challenging. Highly imbalanced data create a bias towards the majority class. In some extreme cases, the minority class in imbalanced data may be completely ignored during the learning phase of the model [11].