A Scalable Machine Learning-based Ensemble Approach to Enhance the Prediction Accuracy for Identifying Students at-Risk

the educational data mining problems, the early prediction of the students' academic performance is the most important task, so that timely and requisite support may be provided to the needy students. Machine learning techniques may be used as an important tool for predicting low-performers in educational institutions. In the present paper, five single-supervised machine learning techniques have been used, including Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, k-Nearest-Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, and Logistic Regression. To analyze the effect of an imbalanced dataset, the performance of these algorithms has been checked with and without various resampling methods such as Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), Borderline SMOTE, SVM-SMOTE, and Adaptive Synthetic (ADASYN). The Random hold-out method and GridSearchCV were used as model validation techniques and hyper-parameter tuning respectively. The results of the present study indicated that Logistic Regression is the best performing classifier with every balanced dataset generated using all of the four resampling techniques and also achieved the highest accuracy of 94.54% with SMOTE. Furthermore, to improve the prediction results and to make the model scalable, the most suitable classifier was integrated with the help of bagging, and a well-accepted accuracy of 95.45% was achieved.