Nowadays, the role of a tutor is more important than ever to prevent students dropout and improve their academic performance. This work proposes a data-driven system to extract relevant information hidden in the student academic data and, thus, help tutors to offer their pupils a more proactive personal guidance. In particular, our system, based on machine learning techniques, makes predictions of dropout intention and courses grades of students, as well as personalized course recommendations. Moreover, we present different visualizations which help in the interpretation of the results. In the experimental validation, we show that the system obtains promising results with data from the degree studies in Law, Computer Science and Mathematics of the Universitat de Barcelona.

The identification of digital market segments to make value-creating propositions is a major challenge for entrepreneurs and marketing managers. New technologies and the Internet have made it possible to collect huge volumes of data that are difficult to analyse using traditional techniques. The purpose of this research is to address this challenge by proposing the use of AI algorithms to cluster customers. Specifically, the proposal is to compare the suitability of supervised algorithms, XGBoost, versus unsupervised algorithms, K-means, for segmenting the digital market. To do so, both algorithms have been applied to a sample of 5 million Spanish users captured between 2010 and 2022 by a lead generation start-up. The results show that supervised learning with this type of data is more useful for segmenting markets than unsupervised learning, as it provides solutions that are better suited to entrepreneurs’ commercial objectives.