Review on Predictive Modelling Techniques for Identifying Students at Risk in University Environment

Abstract

Predictive analytics including statistical techniques, predictive modelling, machine learning, and data mining that analyse current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. Higher education institutions nowadays are under increasing pressure to respond to national and global economic, political and social changes such as the growing need to increase the proportion of students in certain disciplines, embedding workplace graduate attributes and ensuring that the quality of learning programs are both nationally and globally relevant. However, in higher education institution, there are significant numbers of students that stop their studies before graduation, especially for undergraduate students. Problem related to stopping out student and late or not graduating student can be improved by applying analytics. Using analytics, administrators, instructors and student can predict what will happen in future. Administrator and instructors can decide suitable intervention programs for at-risk students and before students decide to leave their study. Many different machine learning techniques have been implemented for predictive modelling in the past including decision tree, k-nearest neighbour, random forest, neural network, support vector machine, naïve Bayesian and a few others. A few attempts have been made to use Bayesian network and dynamic Bayesian network as modelling techniques for predicting at- risk student but a few challenges need to be resolved. The motivation for using dynamic Bayesian network is that it is robust to incomplete data and it provides opportunities for handling changing and dynamic environment. The trends and directions of research on prediction and identifying at-risk student are developing prediction model that can provide as early as possible alert to administrators, predictive model that handle dynamic and changing environment and the model that provide real-time prediction.