Learning from Imbalanced Educational Data Using Ensemble Machine Learning Algorithms

Student’s academic performance is one of the most important parameters for evaluating the standard of any institute. It has become a paramount importance for any institute to identify the student at risk of underperforming or failing or even drop out from the course. Machine Learning techniques may be used to develop a model for predicting student’s performance as early as at the time of admission. The task however is challenging as the educational data required to explore for modelling are usually imbalanced. We explore ensemble machine learning techniques namely bagging algorithm like random forest (rf) and boosting algorithms like adaptive boosting (adaboost), stochastic gradient boosting (gbm), extreme gradient boosting (xgbTree) in an attempt to develop a model for predicting the student’s performance of a private university at Meghalaya using three categories of data namely demographic, prior academic record, personality. The collected data are found to be highly imbalanced and also consists of missing values. We employ k-nearest neighbor (knn) data imputation technique to tackle the missing values. The models are developed on the imputed data with 10 fold cross validation te