Prediction of Student Performance Using Random Forest Combined With Naïve Bayes

Random forest is a powerful ensemble learning technique celebrated for its heightened predictive performance and robustness in handling complex datasets; nevertheless, it is criticized for its computational expense, particularly with a large number of trees in the ensemble. Moreover, the model's interpretability diminishes as the ensemble's complexity increases, presenting challenges in understanding the decision-making process. Although various pruning techniques have been proposed by researchers to tackle these issues, achieving a consensus on the optimal strategy across diverse datasets remains elusive. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces an innovative machine learning algorithm that integrates random forest with Na & iuml;ve Bayes to predict student performance. The proposed method employs the Na & iuml;ve Bayes formula to evaluate random forest branches, classifying data by prioritizing branches based on importance and assigning each example to a single branch for classification. The algorithm is utilized on two sets of student data and is evaluated against seven alternative machine-learning algorithms. The results confirm its strong performance, characterized by a minimal number of branches.