Journal of Innovation Information Technology and Application (JINITA)
Vol 7 No 2 (2025): JINITA, December 2025

Comparative Analysis of C4.5 and Random Forest for Analyzing Factors Affecting Undergraduate Students’ Final Project Completion in Higher Education

Nelci Dessy Rumlaklak (Universitas Nusa Cendana)
Derwin Rony Sina (Universitas Nusa Cendana)
Tifanny Sooai (Univesitas Nusa Cendana)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Dec 2025

Abstract

This study analyzes factors influencing students’ final project completion status in a higher education context using six classification models: C4.5, Random Forest (RF), C4.5 with SMOTE, RF with SMOTE, Cost-Sensitive Random Forest (RF-CS), and Cost-Sensitive C4.5 (C4.5-CS). The dataset consists of 1,017 student records categorized into Ideal and Tidak Ideal, with a severe class imbalance where the minority class represents only 16.49% of the data.The results indicate that baseline models achieved high overall accuracy but showed limited effectiveness in identifying the minority Tidak Ideal class. SMOTE-based models improved minority-class recall but introduced a higher number of false positives, highlighting a trade-off between recall and precision. In contrast, cost-sensitive learning produced the most substantial improvement in minority-class detection. Among all evaluated models, Cost-Sensitive Random Forest demonstrated the most balanced performance by significantly reducing false-negative errors while maintaining reasonable overall accuracy.These findings confirm that algorithm-level cost-sensitive approaches are more effective than oversampling techniques for handling severe class imbalance in educational datasets. The proposed model provides a reliable basis for early identification of students at risk of delayed final project completion and supports data-driven academic decision-making

Copyrights © 2025






Journal Info

Abbrev

jinita

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management Engineering

Description

Software Engineering, Mobile Technology and Applications, Robotics, Database System, Information Engineering, Interactive Multimedia, Computer Networking, Information System, Computer Architecture, Embedded System, Computer Security, Digital Forensic Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual/Augmented ...