A Conceptual Framework to Aid Attribute Selection in Machine Learning Student Performance Prediction Models

Abstract

One of the important key applications of learning analytics is offering an opportunity to the institutions to track the student’s academic activities and provide them with real-time adaptive consultations if the student academic performance diverts towards the inadequate outcome. Still, numerous barriers exist while developing and implementing such kind of learning analytics applications. Machine learning algorithms emerge as useful tools to endorse learning analytics by building models capable of forecasting the final outcome of students based on their available attributes. The machine learning algorithm’s performance demotes with using the entire attributes and thus a vigilant selection of predicting attributes boosts the performance of the produced model. Though, several constructive techniques facilitate to identify the subset of productive attributes, however, the challenging task is to evaluate if the prediction attributes are meaningful, explicit, and controllable by the students. This paper reviews the existing literature to come up with the student’s attributes used in developing prediction models. We propose a conceptual framework which demonstrates the classification of attributes as either latent or dynamic. The latent attributes may appear significant but the student is not able to control these attribute, on the other hand, the student has command to restrain the dynamic attributes. Each of the major class is further categorized to present an opportunity to the researchers to pick constructive attributes for model development.