Predicting who will drop out of nursing courses: A machine learning exercise

The concepts of causation and prediction are different, and have different implications for practice. This distinction is applied here to studies of the problem of student attrition (although it is more widely applicable).Studies of attrition from nursing courses have tended to concentrate on causation, trying, largely unsuccessfully, to elicit what causes drop out. However, the problem may more fruitfully be cast in terms of predicting who is...