The purpose of the study is to analyze the affective traits that affect mathematics achievement through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) as a traditional regression model and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS), as one of the data mining methods. Structural Equation Modeling, one of the regression-based methods, is quite popular for social sciences due to the various advantages it offers; however, it requires very intensive assumptions. MARS method, on the other hand, is a multivariate and adaptive nonparametric statistical regression method used for data classification and modeling. MARS does not need any assumptions such as normality, linearity, homogeneity. It allows variables that do not provide linearity to be included in the analysis. The present study examines whether it is possible to use the MARS method, which is a more flexible method compared to SEM, taking both methods into account. Regarding this goal, the SEM model was created with the program R using the affective data and the achievement variable picked from TIMMS 2019 data. Then, the MARS method was created using the SPM (Salford Predictive Modeler) program. The results of the study showed that at certain points the MARS model gave similar results to the SEM model and MARS model is more compatible with the literature.