Abstract
Students’ performance is vitally important at all stages of education, particularly for Higher Education Institutions. One of the most important issues is to improve the performance and quality of students enrolled. The initial symptom of at-risks’ students need to be observed and earlier preventive measures are required to be carried out so as to determine the cause of students’ dropout rate. Hence, the purpose of this research is to identify factors influencing students’ performance using educational data mining techniques. In order to achieve this, data from different sources is employed into a single platform for pre-processing and modelling. The design of the study is divided into 6 different phases (data collection, data integration, data pre-processing such as cleaning, normalization, and transformation, feature selection, patterns extraction and model optimization as well as evaluation. The datasets were collected from a students’ information system and e-learning system from a public university in Malaysia, while sample data from the Faculty of Engineering were used accordingly. This study also employed the use of academic, demographical, economical and behaviour e-learning features, in which 8 different group models were developed using 3 base-classifiers; Decision Tree, Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine, and 5 multi-classifiers; Random Forest, Bagging, AdaBoost, Stacking and Majority Vote classifier. Finally, the highest accuracy of the classifier model was optimized. At the end, new Students’ Performance Prediction Model was developed. The result proves that combination demographics with behaviour using a meta-classifier model with optimized hyper parameter produced better accuracy to predict students’ performance.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Adejo, O.W., Connolly, T., Adejo, O.W., Connolly, T.: ensemble approach Predicting student academic performance using multi-model heterogeneous ensemble approach. J. Appl. Res. High. Educ. 10(1), 61–75 (2018)
Ahmad, F., Ismail, N.H., Aziz, A.A.: The prediction of students’ academic performance using classification data mining techniques. Appl. Math. Sci. 9(129), 6415–6426 (2015)
AL-Malaise, A., Malibari, A., Alkhozae, M.: Students performance prediction system using multi agent data mining technique. Int. J. Data Min. Knowl. Manag. Process (2014)
Amrieh, E.A., Hamtini, T., Aljarah, I.: Mining educational data to predict student’s academic performance using ensemble methods. Int. J. Database Theor. Appl. 9(8), 119–136 (2016)
Anoopkumar, M., Zubair Rahman, A.M.J.Md.: Model of tuned J48 classification and analysis of performance prediction in educational data mining. Int. J. Appl. Eng. Res. 13(20), 14717–14727 (2018). ISSN 0973-4562
Baker, S.J.R.: Data mining for education. Int. Encycl. Educ. (2010)
Barhamzaid, Z.A.A., Alleyne, A.: Factors affecting student performance in the first accounting course in diploma program under political conflic. J. Educ. Prac. 9(24), 144–154 (2018)
Beemer, J., Spoon, K., He, L., Fan, J., Levine, R.A.: Ensemble learning for estimating individualized treatment effects in student success studies. Int. J. Artif. Intell. Educ. 28(3), 315–335 (2018)
Fernandes, E., Holanda, M., Victorino, M., Borges, V., Carvalho, R., Van Erven, G.: Educational data mining: predictive analysis of academic performance of public school students in the capital of Brazil. J. Bus. Res. 94, 335–343 (2018)
Gudivada, V.N., Irfan, M.T., Fathi, E., Rao, D.L.: Cognitive Analytics: Going Beyond Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning. Handbook of Statistics, 1st edn. Elsevier B.V (2016)
Hossin, M., Sulaiman, M.N.: A review on evaluation metrics for data classification evaluations. Int. J. Data Min. Knowl. Manag. Process (IJDKP) 5(2), 1–11 (2015)
Iam-On, N., Boongoen, T.: Improved student dropout prediction in Thai University using ensemble of mixed-type data clusterings. Int. J. Mach. Learn. Cyber. 8(2), 497–510 (2017)
Kavitha, G., Raj, L.: Educational data mining and learning analytics educational assistance for teaching and learning. Int. J. Comput. Organ. Trends 41(1), 21–25 (2017)
Kondo, N., Okubo, M., Hatanaka, T.: Early detection of at-risk students using machine learning based on LMS log data. In: 2017 6th IIAI International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI), pp. 198–201 (2017)
Kostopoulos, G., Livieris, I.E., Kotsiantis, S., Tampakas, V.: CST-voting: a semi-supervised ensemble method for classification problems. J. Intell. Fuzzy Syst. 35(1), 99–109 (2018)
Lopez Guarin, C.E., Guzman, E.L., Gonzalez, F.A.: A model to predict low academic performance at a specific enrollment using data mining. Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologias del Aprendizaje 10(3), 119–125 (2015)
Marbouti, F., Diefes-Dux, H.A., Madhavan, K.: Models for early prediction of at-risk students in a course using standards-based grading. Comput. Educ. 103, 1–15 (2016)
Márquez-Vera, C., Cano, A., Romero, C., Noaman, A.Y.M., Mousa Fardoun, H., Ventura, S.: Early dropout prediction using data mining: a case study with high school students. Expert Syst. 33(1), 107–124 (2016)
Nam, S.J., Frishkoff, G., Collins-Thompson, K.: predicting students’ disengaged behaviors in an online meaning-generation task. IEEE Trans. Learn. Technol. 1382, 1–14 (2017)
Natek, S., Zwilling, M.: Student data mining solution-knowledge management system related to higher education institutions. Expert Syst. Appl. 41(14), 6400–6407 (2014)
Nunn, S., Avella, J.T., Kanai, T., Kebritchi, M.: Learning analytics methods, benefits, and challenges in higher education: a systematic literature review. Online Learn. 20(2), 13–29 (2016)
Polikar, R., et al.: An ensemble based data fusion approach for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Inf. Fusion 9(1), 83–95 (2008)
Romero, C., Ventura, S.: Educational data mining: a review of the state of the art. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part C (Appl. Rev.) 40(6), 601–618 (2010)
Salini, A., Jeyapriya, U., College, S.M., College, S.M.: A majority vote based ensemble classifier for predicting students academic performance. Int. J. Pure Appl. Math. 118(24), 1–11 (2018)
Shahiri, A.M., Husain, W., Rashid, N.A.: A review on predicting student’s performance using data mining techniques. In: 2015 3rd Information Systems International Conference, pp. 414–422 (2015)
Tamhane, A., Appleton, J.: Predicting student risks through longitudinal analysis. In: KDD, pp. 1544–1552 (2014)
Wanjau, S.K., Muketha, G.M.: Improving student enrollment prediction using ensemble classifiers. Int. J. Comput. Appl. Technol. Res. 7(03), 122–128 (2018)
Xu, J., Moon, K.H., Van Der Schaar, M.: A machine learning approach for tracking and predicting student performance in degree programs. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal Process. 11(5), 742–753 (2017)
Zollanvari, A., Kizilirmak, R.C., Kho, Y.H., Hernandez-Torrano, D.: Predicting students’ GPA and developing intervention strategies based on self-regulatory learning behaviors. IEEE Access 5, 23792–23802 (2017)
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Research Management Centre (RMC), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) for the financial support under Tier 2 Research University Grant (Q.K130000.2638.14J88).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hassan, H., Anuar, S., Ahmad, N.B. (2019). Students’ Performance Prediction Model Using Meta-classifier Approach. In: Macintyre, J., Iliadis, L., Maglogiannis, I., Jayne, C. (eds) Engineering Applications of Neural Networks. EANN 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1000. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20257-6_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20257-6_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20256-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20257-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)