Purpose – The ultimate objective of the any e-Learning system is to meet the specific need of the online learners and provide them with various features to have efficacious learning experiences by understanding their complexities. Any e-Learning system could be much more improved by tracking students commitment and disengagement on that course, in turn, would allow system to have personalized involvements at appropriate times in order to re-engage learners. Motivations play a important role to get back the learners on the track could be done by analyzing of several attributes of the log files. This paper aims to analyze the multiple attributes which cause the learners to disengage from an online learning environment. Design/methodology/approach – For this improvisation, Web based learning system is researched using data mining techniques in education. There are various attributes characterized for the disengagement prediction using web log file analysis. Though, there have been several attempts to include motivating characteristics in e-Learning systems are adapted, presently influence on cognition is acknowledged mostly. Findings – Classification is one of the predictive data mining technique which makes prediction about values of data using known results found from different data sets. To find out the optimal solution for identifying disengaged learners in the online learning systems, Naive Bayesian (NB) classifier with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used which will classify the data set and then perform the independent analysis. Originality/value – The experimental results shows that the use of unrelated variables in the class attributes will reduce the accuracy and reliability of a any classification model. However, the hybrid PSO algorithm is clearly more apt to find minor subsets of attributes than the PSO with NB classifier. The NB classifier combined with hybrid PSO feature selection method proves to be the best feature selection capability without degrading the classification accuracy. It is further proved to be an effective method for mining large structural data in much less computation time. © 2016, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.