Semi-Supervised Feature Selection of Educational Data Mining for Student Performance Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, the informatization of the educational system has caused a substantial increase in educational data. Educational data mining can assist in identifying the factors influencing students’ performance. However, two challenges have arisen in the field of educational data mining: (1) How to handle the abundance of unlabeled data? (2) How to identify the most crucial characteristics that impact student performance? In this paper, a semi-supervised feature selection framework is proposed to analyze the factors influencing student performance. The proposed method is semi-supervised, enabling the processing of a considerable amount of unlabeled data with only a few labeled instances. Additionally, by solving a feature selection matrix, the weights of each feature can be determined, to rank their importance. Furthermore, various commonly used classifiers are employed to assess the performance of the proposed feature selection method. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed semi-supervised feature selection approach. The experiments indicate that behavioral characteristics are significant for student performance, and the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art feature selection methods by approximately 3.9% when extracting the most important feature.