Publication . Camelo, Diogo; Santos, João C.C.; Martins, Maria Prudência; Gouveia, Paulo D.F.
School dropout in higher education is an academic, economic, political and social problem, which has a great impact and is difficult to resolve. In order to mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a predictive model of classification, based on artificial neural networks, which allows the prediction, at the end of the first school year, of the propensity that the computer engineering students of a polytechnic institute in the interior of the country have for dropout. A differentiating aspect of this study is that it considers the classifications obtained in the course units of the first academic year as potential predictors of dropout. A new approach in the process of selecting the factors that foreshadow the dropout allowed isolating 12 explanatory variables, which guaranteed a good predictive capacity of the model (AUC = 78.5%). These variables reveal fundamental aspects for the adoption of management strategies that may be more assertive in the combat to academic dropout.
