Prediction of student exam performance using data mining classification algorithms

Abstract

Student outcomes are of great importance in higher education institutions. Accreditation bodies focus on them as an indicator to measure the performance and effectiveness of the institution. Forecasting students’ academic performance is crucial for every educational establishment seeking to enhance performance and perseverance of its students and reduce the failure rate in the future. The main goal of this study is to predict the performance of undergraduate first-level students in the Computer Department during the years 2016 to 2021 to enhance their performance in future by discovering the best algorithm use to analyze the educational data to identify the students’ academic performance. The secondary data was collected by reviewing the Student Affairs Department at the Faculty of Specific Education at Damietta University, in addition to the Statistics Department at the university. The dataset contained 830 instances after excluding 139 instances of missing values, irrelevant rows, and outliers. The dataset was divided into train (577 instances (70%)), test (253 instances (30%)) and involved six features such year, midterm, practical exam, writing exam, final total degree, and grade. This paper use five machine learning (ML) algorithms which was selected according to the literature review and high accuracy in predicting educational data mining: For the purpose of comparison, a number of different machine learning algorithms, such as Random Forest, Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, Neural Network, and K-Nearest Neighbours, were utilized and evaluated with evaluation metrics such as confusion matrix, accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The Random Forest and Decision Tree classifiers emerged as the top-performing algorithms, accurately categorizing 250 instances when predicting students' performance in the statistics course. This was determined based on the findings of the study. Out of a total of 253 instances that were included in the testing set, they only made three incorrect classifications.