Behavior-driven Student Performance Prediction with Tri-branch Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Student performance prediction aims to leverage student-related information to predict their future academic outcomes, which may be beneficial to numerous educational applications, such as personalized teaching and academic early warning. In this paper, we seek to address the problem by analyzing students' daily studying and living behavior, which is comprehensively recorded via campus smart cards. Different from previous studies, we propose an end-to-end student performance prediction model, namely Tri-branch CNN, which is equipped with three types of convolutional filters, i.e., the row-wise convolution, column-wise convolution, and group-wise convolution, to effectively capture the duration, periodicity, and location-aware characteristic of student behavior, respectively. We also introduce the attention mechanism and cost-sensitive learning strategy to further improve the accuracy of our approach. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset demonstrate the potential of our approach for student performance prediction.