Predicting Students Performance in Educational Data Mining

Education can be utilized as a tool to face many problems, overcome many hurdles in life. The knowledge obtained from education helps to enhance opportunities in one's employment development. To extract useful information from the knowledge obtained, Educational Data Mining is widely used. Educational data mining provides the process of applying different data mining tools and techniques to analyze and visualize the data of an institution (school) and can be used to discover a unique pattern of students' academic performance and behavior. The present work intends to enhance students' academic performance in secondary school using data mining techniques. Real data was collected using school reports and questionnaire method by the Portugal school which has been used in this paper. Naive Bayesian algorithm can be easily implemented to predict the students' academic performance and behavior. Classification of students into two classes, pass and fail, involves training phase and testing phase. In training phase, Naive Bayes classifier is built and in the testing phase, Naive Bayes classifier is used to make the prediction. The accuracy of the classifier is calculated using WEKA tool in which confusion matrix is generated. The accuracy of the classifier obtained is 87% which can be further improved by the selection of appropriate attributes. Developing the classification algorithms in this way helps to obtain a more efficient student performance predictor tool using other data mining algorithms and it also helps to improve the quality of education in an educational institution.

This bibliometric study on data mining in education synonymous with big educational data utilizes VOSviewer and Harzing’s Publish and Perish to analyze the metadata of 1,439 journal articles found in Scopus from 2010 to 2022. As bibliometric analyses in this field are lacking, this study aims to provide a comprehensive outlook on the current developments and impact of research in this field. This study employs descriptive and trends analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis, co-occurrences of keywords, terms map analysis, and analysis of the impact and performance of publications. It also partially replicates a similar study conducted by Wang et al. (2022), who used the Web of Science (WoS) database. The study is reported in an article entitled ‘Big data and data mining in education: A bibliometrics study from 2010 to 2022’. Results show that data mining in education is a growing research field. There is also a significant difference between the publications in Scopus and WoS. The study found several research areas and topics, such as student academic performance prediction, e-learning, machine learning, and innovative data mining techniques, to be the core basis for collaborating and continuing current research in this field. These results highlight the importance of continuing research on data mining in education, guiding future research in tackling educational challenges.

Growth in system complexity increases the need for automated techniques dedicated to different log analysis tasks such as Log-based Anomaly Detection (LAD). The latter has been widely addressed in the literature, mostly by means of a variety of deep learning techniques. However, despite their many advantages, that focus on deep learning techniques is somewhat arbitrary as traditional Machine Learning (ML) techniques may perform well in many cases, depending on the context and datasets. In the same vein, semi-supervised techniques deserve the same attention as supervised techniques since the former have clear practical advantages. Further, current evaluations mostly rely on the assessment of detection accuracy. However, this is not enough to decide whether or not a specific ML technique is suitable to address the LAD problem in a given context. Other aspects to consider include training and prediction times as well as the sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning, which in practice matters to engineers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study, in which we evaluate a wide array of supervised and semi-supervised, traditional and deep ML techniques w.r.t. four evaluation criteria: detection accuracy, time performance, sensitivity of detection accuracy and time performance to hyperparameter tuning. Our goal is to provide much stronger and comprehensive evidence regarding the relative advantages and drawbacks of alternative techniques for LAD. The experimental results show that supervised traditional and deep ML techniques fare similarly in terms of their detection accuracy and prediction time on most of the benchmark datasets considered in our study. Moreover, overall, sensitivity analysis to hyperparameter tuning with respect to detection accuracy shows that supervised traditional ML techniques are less sensitive than deep learning techniques. Further, semi-supervised techniques yield significantly worse detection accuracy than supervised techniques.

Educational data mining is used to convert the randomly available data in educational settings into some beneficial information. It helps in building insights for different research questions that arise in educational settings like performance prediction of students in academics, designing of new courses, instructors’ feedback, method or mode of teaching, etc. This paper aims to answer questions that has been a major challenge for researchers, i.e. the huge list of drop out rate and lower percentage of first-year students. It highlights factors that affect the performance of students. There are a lot of studies that has been conducted in the field education like psychology and statistics. This case study targeted students enrolled in Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA). The aim of our research work was to show the impact of variables on academic performance of students. The sample size of the study is 480 students of BCA. The questionnaire is based on factors categorized as Demographic, Academic, Social and Behavioural. The results of the study revealed that family income, parents qualification and interaction with teachers were among the influential factors along with previous year percentage, current year attendance and class behaviour.

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate educational data mining methods to increase the predictive accuracy of student academic performance for a university course setting. Student engagement data collected in real time and over self-paced activities assisted this investigation.Design/methodology/approachClassification data mining techniques have been adapted to predict students’ academic performance. Four algorithms, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, k-Nearest Neighbour and Random Forest, were used to generate predictive models. Process mining features have also been integrated to determine their effectiveness in improving the accuracy of predictions.FindingsThe results show that when general features derived from student activities are combined with process mining features, there is some improvement in the accuracy of the predictions. Of the four algorithms, the study finds Random Forest to be more accurate than the other three algorithms in a statistically significant way. The validation of the best-known classifier model is then tested by predicting students’ final-year academic performance for the subsequent year.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study was limited to datasets gathered over one semester and for one course. The outcomes would be more promising if the dataset comprised more courses. Moreover, the addition of demographic information could have provided further representations of students’ performance. Future work will address some of these limitations.Originality/valueThe model developed from this research can provide value to institutions in making process- and data-driven predictions on students’ academic performances.

The aim of this study is to undertake an empirical inquiry and comparison of the effectiveness of various classifiers with ensembles classifiers in the prediction of student academic performance. A single classifier algorithm will be compared against the performance and efficiency of ensemble classifiers. Reducing student attrition is a major problem for educational institutions all over the world. The search for solutions to increase student retention and graduation rates continues for educators. This is only possible if at-risk students are identified and intervened with as soon as possible. However, the majority of regularly used prediction models are inefficient and inaccurate as a result of inherent classifier limitations and the inclusion of insignificant inputs in their calculations. The majority of data mining and machine learning researcher focused on developing an algorithm that can extract useful information from massive amounts of data after being processed by a computer. The most difficult problem in predictive modelling is identifying the most effective prediction algorithms that are also accurate enough to be useful. Therefore, a multi-level homogeneous ensemble predictive (MLHoEP) model is designed, which uses the different techniques of data mining like feature selection, ensemble learning techniques like boosting and bagging. Seven distinct machine learning algorithms were used on this model to predict and analyse the academic performance of the students. The performance of the classification algorithms in terms of prediction was evaluated using k-fold cross-validation. The study contributes to the body of knowledge by suggesting the development of homogeneous classifiers that may be used to accurately predict students’ academic success. It also proposes the construction of homogeneous classifiers, which may be deployed for accurate student performance prediction, in order to provide a better explanation for the poor performance prediction. As a result of this research, it has been demonstrated that the technique of applying homogeneous ensemble approaches is incredibly efficient and accurate in terms of predicting student performance and assisting in identifying students, who are in danger of dropping out of school. The study compared the accuracy and efficiency of single classifiers to ensembles of classifiers in terms of performance. It was discovered in the research that a homogeneous model with excellent accuracy and efficiency might be developed for anticipating student performance. These key problems have been successfully addressed by the findings of this research study: Which characteristics of students are the most effective predictors of academic performance? How accurate are approaches such as bagging and boosting ensembles for predicting student academic performance? The approach offered in this study will aid educational administrators and policymakers in designing new policies and curriculum-linked to student retention in higher education. This research can also aid in the identification of students who are at risk of dropping out of school early, providing for timely intervention and support. Prospective research will examine the creation and implementation of an automated prediction system known as the students’ academic performance forecast framework, which will collect data from students via online submission and produce a prediction result for their academic performance.KeywordsEducational data miningEnsemble learningMultilayer perceptronRandom forestNaïve BayesCorrelation attribute evaluationInformation gainGain ratio

Educational data generated through various platforms such as e-learning, e-admission systems, and automated result management systems can be effectively processed through educational data mining techniques in order to gather highly useful insights into students’ performance. The prediction of student performance from historical academic data is a highly desirable application of educational data mining. In this regard, there is an urgent need to develop an automated technique for student performance prediction. Existing studies on student performance prediction primarily focus on utilizing the conventional feature representation schemes, where extracted features are fed to a classifier. In recent years, deep learning has enabled researchers to automatically extract high-level features from raw data. Such advanced feature representation schemes enable superior performance in challenging tasks. In this work, we examine the deep neural network model, namely, the attention-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network to efficiently predict student performance (grades) from historical data. In this article, we have used the most advanced BiLSTM combined with an attention mechanism model by analyzing existing research problems, which are based on advanced feature classification and prediction. This work is really vital for academicians, universities, and government departments to early predict the performance. The superior sequence learning capabilities of BiLSTM combined with attention mechanism yield superior performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art. The proposed method has achieved a prediction accuracy of 90.16%.

Every year students success rate was analysed by the Educational Institutions to develop their Academic standard. To identify the success rate many kinds of techniques are used such as statistics, physical examination and currently ongoing datamining techniques. Data mining Techniques was widely used in many fields, it is also used in the Educational environment known as Educational Data Mining (EDM). Educational data mining generate prototype in solving the research problems in students data and used to locate the unseen patterns in the students detailed dateset. This paper uses the EDM to characterize the distinct factors affecting the students performance by making predictions with efficient algorithms. Educational professionals have to identify the causes for the student failure in academic performance and the students not succeed in completing their education which becomes a social problem these days. The machine learning algorithms help the researchers for evaluation of student’s learning habits, their academic performance and added enhancement if required. This paper would discuss different kinds of algorithms to analyse the economic background of the students which mainly affects the students performance. The dataset was utilized from the UCI Repository of secondary school students performance and analysed using the Weka tool for the datamining process.

Objectives: Data mining techniques are implemented in many organizations as a standard procedure for analyzing the large volume of available data, extracting useful information and knowledge to support the major decision-making processes. Data mining can be applied to wide variety of applications in the educational sector for the purpose of improving the performance of students as well as the status of the educational institutions. Educational data mining is rapidly developing as a key technique in the analysis of data generated in the educational domain. Methods: The aim of this study presents an analysis of final year results of UG degree students using data mining technique, which carried out in three of the private colleges in Tamil Nadu state of India. The primary objective of this research work is to apply the classification techniques to the prediction of the performance of students in end semester university examinations. Particularly, the decision tree algorithm C4.5 (J48), Bayesian classifiers, k Nearest Neighbor algorithm and two rule learner’s algorithms namely OneR and JRip are used for classifying the performance of students as well as to develop a model of student performance predictors. Results: The result of this study reveals that overall accuracy of the tested classifiers is above 60%. In addition classification accuracy for the different classes reveals that the predictions are worst for distinction class and fairly good for the first class. The JRip produces highest classification accuracy for the Distinction. Classification of the students based on the attributes reveals that prediction rates are not uniform among the classification algorithms. Also shows that selected data attributes have found to be influenced the classification process. The results showed to be satisfactory. Improvements: The study can be extended to draw the performance of other classification techniques on an expanded data set with more distinct attributes to get more accurate results.

Recently, student’s academic performance prediction has become an increasingly prominent research topic in the field of Educational Data Mining (EDM). The prediction of student’s academic performance aims to explore information that is beneficial to the learning process of student. Therefore, accurate prediction of student’s academic performance provide benefits for education institutions to improve the quality of their institutions by improving the learning process of students. In predicting the student’s academic performance, the problem of high dimensional dataset is often faced in the datasets which significantly impacts the accuracy of student academic performance prediction. This paper proposed Genetic Algorithm based Feature Selection (GAFS) along with selected single classifier for classification in order to improve the accuracy in predicting student academic performance. Kaggle dataset is used in this paper and two phase of experiment have been conducted, single classifier without GAFS, and single classifier with GAFS. Results from the experiments show that, the accuracy of the proposed GAFS for classification makes an impressive performance in predicting student academic performance in terms of accuracy compare to existing techniques.

Advances in educational data mining and learning analytics techniques allow instructors and institutions to analyze log data generated from learning management systems to inform themselves about student learning and success. Over the years, several machine learning techniques have been developed, used, and researched to provide more accurate predictions of students’ performance in courses. These techniques commonly need and are focused on large sample sizes and low dimensionality which is not the case for university courses in blended contexts. In some studies, student cohorts across years and programs are merged together to increase sample sizes and achieve better prediction accuracies. While there have been other recent studies experimenting with lower samples and fewer dimensions, they do not focus on cohort influences on prediction. There is a need to study this area of analysis and prediction in multi-cohort university courses both to inform (a) instructors, of key course features, prediction insights, and student study behavior to offer relevant interventions to specific cohorts and (b) curriculum designers, who can gain insights into improving program designs. In this study, we look for empirical evidence if performance metrics and key features in prediction are influenced by cohorts in multi-cohort university courses.KeywordsPredictive learning analyticsHigher educationMulti-cohort university courses

In recent years, research on Educational Data Mining (EDM) has developed rapidly. However, most researches focus on data source issues, and ignore the importance of data preprocessing and data mining algorithms. This paper has studied EDM, with a special focus on educational big data mining algorithms. Firstly, it analyzed the relevant elements of EDM and introduces big data technology based on the requirements of educational data application. Then it introduced the common educational big data mining algorithms and their applications, and finally discussed the development trend of educational big data mining algorithms.

Student performance is related to complex and correlated factors. The implementation of a new advancement of technologies in educational displacement has unlimited potentials. One of these advances is the use of analytics and data mining to predict student academic accomplishment and performance. Given the existing literature, machine learning (ML) approaches such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can continuously be improved. This work examines and surveys the current literature regarding the ANN methods used in predicting students’ academic performance. This study also attempts to capture a pattern of the most used ANN techniques and algorithms. Of note, the articles reviewed mainly focused on higher education. The results indicated that ANN is always used in combination with data analysis and data mining methodologies, allowing studies to assess the effectiveness of their findings in evaluating academic achievement. No pattern was detected regarding selecting the input variables as they are mainly based on the context of the study and the availability of data. Moreover, the very limited tangible findings referred to the use of techniques in the actual context and target objective of improving student outcomes, performance, and achievement. An important recommendation of this work is to overcome the identified gap related to the only theoretical and limited application of the ANN in a real-life situation to help achieve the educational goals.

The prediction of students’ academic performance is a subset of Educational Data Mining (EDM) which deals with the large-scale data gathered from an education system. EDM aims at deriving meaningful information from this data to facilitate the stakeholders of the education system. The proposed work uses various machine learning (ML) techniques to predict the student’s academic performance using the real data collected (comprising the academic history and personal habits of the students). Furthermore, a comparison of ML techniques on different evaluation metrics has been presented. It will assist the students to keep a track of their academic performance and accordingly, manage their study pattern to help them perform well in future.

Predicting students’ academic performance is a crucial initiative in the field of education, as it allows educators and administrators to spot students who may require extra assistance, customize educational resources to meet individual requirements, and improve overall educational results. Conventional approaches to forecasting academic achievement, such as statistical analysis and expert evaluation, have certain drawbacks in terms of precision and scalability. The emergence of machine learning (ML) methods provides a possible alternative by utilizing extensive datasets and advanced algorithms to reveal patterns and generate more precise predictions. This investigation’s primary goal is to explore the predictive modelling of student academic performance by improving the accuracy of predictions through the utilization of machine learning techniques. The study was conducted utilizing the Python programming environment. The prediction of student academic performance was carried out utilising the Bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) based Weighted Cost Effective Random Forest algorithm. The study utilized the Deep Encoder CNN-Bi-LSTM for optimal feature extraction to foresee student academic performance. The extracted features were then classified using the Weighted Cost Effective Random Forest (WECRF) classifier, and the classification was evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, specificity, sensitivity, and recall. The issues addressed include the class imbalance, computational complexity, cost, and huge dimensional issue, among others. The random forest method achieved Precision Score - 0.72, Recall Score - 0.68, F1 Score - 0.69, and Accuracy - 0.77 in this study. Moreover, the suggested technique facilitates the automated forecasting and enhancement of students' future academic performance. Keywords: Predictive Modelling; Students; Academic Performance; Machine Learning; Bi-LSTM; CNN-Bi-LSTM; Deep Learning.