EMT: Ensemble Meta-Based Tree Model for Predicting Student Performance

Abstract

In recent decades, predicting the performance of students in the academic field has revealed the attention by researchers for enhancing the weaknesses and provides support for future students. In order to facilitate the task, educational data mining (EDM) techniques are utilized for constructing prediction models built from student academic historical records. These models present the embedded knowledge that is more readable and interpretable by humans. Hence, in this paper, the contributions are presented in three folds that include the following: (i) providing a thorough analysis about the selected features and their effects on the performance value using statistical analysis techniques, (ii) building and studying the performance of several classifiers from different families of machine learning (ML) techniques, (iii) proposing an ensemble meta-based tree model (EMT) classifier technique for predicting the student performance. The experimental results show that the EMT as the ensemble technique gained a high accuracy performance reaching 98.5% (or 0.985). In addition, the proposed EMT technique obtains a high performance, which is a superior result compared to the other techniques.