Arff convertor tool for WEKA data mining software

The paper presents a tool that exports data from different database types into arff format, in order to be used by WEKA data mining and machine learning software. The developed application allows the connection to databases, the visualization of the relationships between tables, the visualization of the structure and of the content of these databases throughout several uniform and dynamic interfaces as well as generating entry files (arff files) for WEKA, that contain data from one or more related tables. In order to use the developed tool, there is no SQL knowledge required. The application determines the numeric, categorical, string and data attributes. For further validation, using the developed application and WEKA, the authors have realized an educational data mining study on a Microsoft Visual Fox Pro database, including data concerning 2100 students. These data have been extracted from the student management application that is working inside Faculty of Automation and Computers of “Politehnica” University from Timisoara.