Predicting students' academic progress and related attributes in first-year medical students: an analysis with artificial neural networks and Naïve Bayes.

Both ANN and Naïve Bayes methods can be useful for predicting medical students' academic achievement in an undergraduate program, based on information of their prior knowledge and socio-demographic factors. Although ANN offered slightly superior results, Naïve Bayes made it possible to obtain an in-depth analysis of how the different variables influenced the model. The use of educational data mining techniques and machine learning classification techniques have potential in medical education.