Student performance estimation based on topic models considering a range of lessons

Abstract

This paper proposes a prediction framework for student performance based on comment data mining. Given the comments containing multiple topics, we seek to discover the topics that help to predict final student grades as their performance. To this end, the paper proposes methods that analyze students’ comments by two topic models: Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The methods employ Support Vector Machine (SVM) to generate prediction models of final student grades. In addition, Considering the student grades predicted in a range of lessons can deal with prediction error occurred in each lesson, and achieve further improvement of the student grade prediction.