Prediction of students’ academic performance using ANN with mini-batch gradient descent and Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithms

Abstract

Online learning indirectly increases stress, thereby reducing social interaction among students and leading to physical and mental fatigue, which in turn reduced students’ academic performance. Therefore, the prediction of academic performance is required sooner to identify at-risk students with declining performance. In this paper, we use artificial neural networks (ANN) to predict this performance. ANNs with two optimization algorithms, mini-batch gradient descent and Levenberg-Marquardt, are implemented on students’ learning activity data in course X, which is recorded on LMS UI. Data contains 232 students and consists of two periods: the first month and second month of study. Before ANNs are implemented, both normalization and usage of ADASYN are conducted. The results of ANN implementation using two optimization algorithms within 10 trials each are compared based on the average accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity values. We then determine the best period to predict unsuccessful students correctly. The results show that both algorithms give better predictions over two months instead of one. ANN with mini-batch gradient descent has an average sensitivity of 78%; the corresponding values for ANN with Levenberg-Marquardt are 75%. Therefore, ANN with mini-batch gradient descent as its optimization algorithm is more suitable for predicting students that have potential to fail.