Student achievement prediction using deep neural network from multi-source campus data

Abstract

Finding students at high risk of poor academic performance as early as possible plays an important role in improving education quality. To do so, most existing studies have used the traditional machine learning algorithms to predict students’ achievement based on their behavior data, from which behavior features are extracted manually thanks to expert experience and knowledge. However, owing to an increase in the varieties and overall volume of behavioral data, it has become more and more challenging to identify high-quality handcrafted features. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning model that automatically extracts features from students’ multi-source heterogeneous behavior data to predict academic performance. The key innovation of this model is that it uses long short-term memory networks to capture inherent time-series features for each type of behavior, and it takes two-dimensional convolutional networks to extract correlation features among different behaviors. We conducted experiments with four types of daily behavior data from students of the university in Beijing. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep model method outperforms several machine learning algorithms.