Neural-fuzzy with representative sets for prediction of student performance

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In this paper, a new method for handling the Multi-Input Multi-Output Student Academic Performance Prediction (MIMO SAPP) problem is proposed. The MIMO SAPP aims to predict the future performance of a student after being enrolled into a university. The existing methods have limitations of using a parameter set and an unsuitable training strategy. Thus, the new method called MANFIS-S (Multi Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System with Representative Sets) uses multiple parameter sets and a special learning strategy to resolve those weaknesses. Specifically, the idea of multiple parameter sets is to approximate the MANFIS-S model with many meaningful parameters to ensure the performance of system. This is regarded as the representative problem, which is mathematically formulated and theoretically validated. The idea for the special learning strategy is to use global and local training. In global training, a random parameter set is trained from the first to the last record of the database. Each time of training results in a set of parameters. Global training will rectify and achieve a meaningful subset of parameters by the last training process. In local training, there are 2 types of parameters in MANFIS-S namely premise and consequent that are trained by the gradient descent and Particle Swarm Optimization in a hybrid way. Lastly, for a new record in the testing set, Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbor is used to find which group it belongs to. The proposed MANFIS-S model is experimentally validated against ANFIS, MANFIS, OneR and Random Tree in a benchmark student performance dataset from UCI, a real student performance dataset from VNU University of Science, Vietnam, and 3 educational datasets taken from KDD Cup. The experiments demonstrated the superiority of MANFIS-S over the related algorithms in term of accuracy.