Journal of Information Systems and Informatics
Vol 8 No 3 (2026): June

An Empirical Comparison of C4.5, Naive Bayes, and KNN for Scholarship Selection

Burham Isnanto (Institut Sains dan Bisnis Atma Luhur)
Rahmat Sulaiman (Institut Sains dan Bisnis Atma Luhur)



Article Info

Publish Date
22 Jun 2026

Abstract

Scholarship selection is a critical process in higher education that requires objective, fair, and efficient evaluation of applicants based on academic and socio-economic criteria. However, manual assessment methods are often vulnerable to bias, inconsistency, and administrative inefficiencies, which may affect the transparency and quality of decision-making. This study compares the performance of three supervised machine learning algorithms—C4.5 Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)—for scholarship recipient classification. The dataset consisted of 1,500 student records obtained from the KelasAI repository and included ten predictor attributes, namely Grade Point Average, Parental Income, Academic Semester, Family Dependents, Organizational Involvement, Academic Achievement, Regional Origin, Scholarship Type, National Examination Score, and Economic Status. The target variable was categorized into Accepted and Rejected classes. Experiments were conducted using RapidMiner Studio with 10-fold stratified cross-validation to ensure reliable model evaluation. The results showed that Naive Bayes achieved the best performance, with 81.6% accuracy, 81.8% precision, and 81.3% recall, outperforming C4.5 and KNN. These findings demonstrate the potential of machine learning to support more transparent and data-driven scholarship selection processes.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

isi

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal-ISI is a scientific article journal that is the result of ideas, great and original thoughts about the latest research and technological developments covering the fields of information systems, information technology, informatics engineering, and computer science, and industrial engineering ...