An intelligent college English level 4 pass rate forecasting model using machine learning

Abstract

In the last few decades, technological improvements have had a considerable impact on education, much like many other fields of society and human endeavor. The applications of today’s cutting-edge technology are numerous in education, but recently researchers focused on using these technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), for students’ performance prediction prior to the exam. It makes perfect sense to forecast student success to help all participants in the educational process. Student performance prediction may assist them in the selection of suitable courses and in creating their academic schedules. Keeping in mind the importance of student performance evaluation, this paper analyzes the prediction rate of college English level 4 by using one of the powerful ML algorithms called random forest (RF). RF uses numerous classifiers, or “ensembles”, rather than just one classifier, and is based on the decision tree technique. To do this, we constructed input and output variables and collected data for these variables, including basic student information (gender, ethnicity, major), English scores on college admission exams, college English scores (total of four semesters), and extracurricular activities of college students. Preprocessing was performed on the collected data, which included the removal of unnecessary attributes, handling outliers, normalization, and data cleaning. After the preprocessing, the features were extracted and transformed into reduced dimensionality by the local-preserving projection (LPP) algorithm. From the extracted features, we selected only the most relevant in order to feed them as input to the RF model. The model is implemented in MATLAB in order to evaluate its performance. The efficiency of the proposed model is evaluated with the help of experiments in order to verify the effectiveness of the model. The performance of the RF algorithm-based college English IV pass rate prediction model is evaluated by computing the prediction accuracy, recall rate, and hit rate of the classification results. We achieved a prediction accuracy of 96.5%, a recall rate of 89.5%, and a hit rate of 93.3%. The results show that the random RF-based prediction model for college English level 4 has a good classification effect and that the prediction results are more accurate.