Improving Student Performance Prediction Through Feature Selection: Insights from ‘Offee’ Assessment Data during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Mousmi Pawar, Jyotshna Dongardive
Abstract
Post-pandemic student performance prediction has gained considerable attention within the academic community. Educational institutions worldwide have adopted blended learning approaches for delivering education and assessments. In this study, we harnessed data from the ‘Offee’ assessment platform based in Mumbai, India, spanning from September 2020 to October 2022. This dataset allows us to analyze the real impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on examinations. To tackle the challenges posed by high-dimensional data, we employed feature selection techniques to retain only the most significant features for predicting student performance. Specifically, we assessed the effectiveness of two decision tree-based methods, J48 classifier and Random Forest, in conjunction with the ranker search method using wrapper subset evaluation. The resulting feature set was then utilized to train and test a Support Vector Machine model for predicting student performance. Our findings reveal that both J48 and Random Forest feature selection methods yield impressive precision accuracy rates for student performance prediction, achieving 93.14% and 86.24%, respectively. In contrast, using the dataset without feature selection resulted in lower precision accuracy, standing at 79.9%, and consumed more time during model training and development. In summary, this study underscores the significance of feature selection in enhancing the accuracy of student performance prediction compared to utilizing the dataset without such feature curation.