Hybrid machine learning algorithms for predicting academic performance

Abstract

The large volume of data and its complexity in educational institutions require the sakes from informative technologies. In order to facilitate this task, many researchers have focused on using machine learning to extract knowledge from the education database to support students and instructors in getting better performance. In prediction models, the challenging task is to choose the effective techniques which could produce satisfying predictive accuracy. Hence, in this work, we introduced a hybrid approach of principal component analysis (PCA) as conjunction with four machines learning (ML) algorithms: random forest (RF), C5.0 of decision tree (DT), and naive Bayes (NB) of Bayes network and support vector machine (SVM), to improve the performances of classification by solving the misclassification problem. Three datasets were used to confirm the robustness of the proposed models. Through the given datasets, we evaluated the classification accuracy and root mean square error (RSME) as evaluation metrics of the proposed models. In this classification problem, 10-fold cross-validation was proposed to evaluate the predictive performance. The proposed hybrid models produced very prediction results which shown itself as the optimal prediction and classification algorithms.