Classifiers ensemble and synthetic minority oversampling techniques for academic performance prediction

Abstract

The increasing need for data driven decision making recently has resulted in the application of data mining in various fields including the educational sector which is referred to as educational data mining. The need for improving the performance of data mining models has also been identified as a gap for future researcher. In Nigeria, higher educational institutions collect various students’ data, but these data are rarely used in any decision or policy making to improve the academic performance of students. This research work, attempts to improve the performance of data mining models for predicting students’ academic performance using stacking classifiers ensemble and synthetic minority over-sampling techniques. The research was conducted by adopting and evaluating the performance of J48, IBK and SMO classifiers. The individual classifiers models, standard stacking classifier ensemble model and stacking classifiers ensemble model were trained and tested on 206 students’ data set from the faculty of science federal university Dutse. Students’ specific previous academic performance records at Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, Senior Secondary Certificate Examination and first year Cumulative Grade Point Average of students are used as data inputs in WEKA 3.9.1 data mining tool to predict students’ graduation classes of degrees at undergraduate level. The result shows that application of synthetic minority over-sampling technique for class balancing improves all the various models performance with the proposed modified stacking classifiers ensemble model outperforming the various classifiers models in both performance accuracy and RSME values making it the best model.