Abstract
Dropout refers to the phenomenon of students leaving school before completing their degree or program of study. Dropout is a major concern for educational institutions, as it affects not only the students themselves but also the institutions’ reputation and funding. Dropout can occur for a variety of reasons, including academic, financial, personal, and social factors. Therefore, understanding the factors that contribute to dropout and developing effective strategies to prevent it is a critical challenge for educational institutions. In this study, we propose a hybrid deep learning model based on Long Short-Term Memory and Deep Neural Network algorithms for school dropout prediction. The proposed model was compared with previous works and several other machine learning algorithms, including Deep Neural Network (DNN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Trees (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF). The results showed that the proposed DNN-LSTM model outperforms the other models in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and materials
All data are available from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/thedevastator/higher-education-predictors-of-student-retention.
References
Adelman, M., Haimovich, F., Ham, A., & et al. (2018). Predicting school dropout with administrative data: new evidence from guatemala and honduras. Education Economics, 26(4), 356–372.
Agrusti, F., Mezzini, M., & Bonavolontà, G. (2020). Deep learning approach for predicting university dropout: A case study at roma tre university. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 16(1), 44–54.
Al-Azazi, F.A., & Ghurab, M. (2023). Ann-lstm: A deep learning model for early student performance prediction in mooc. Heliyon
Baranyi, M., Nagy, M., & Molontay, R. (2020). Interpretable deep learning for university dropout prediction. In: Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on information technology education, pp 13–19
Baron, M. J. S., Sanabria, J. S. G., & Diaz, J. E. E. (2022). Deep neural network dnn applied to the analysis of student dropout. Investigación e Innovación en Ingenierías, 10(1), 202–214.
Barros, T. M., Souza Neto, P. A., Silva, I., & et al. (2019). Predictive models for imbalanced data: A school dropout perspective. Education Sciences, 9(4), 275.
Chi, Z., Zhang, S., & Shi, L. (2023). Analysis and prediction of mooc learners’ dropout behavior. Applied Sciences, 13(2), 1068.
Chung, J. Y., & Lee, S. (2019). Dropout early warning systems for high school students using machine learning. Children and Youth Services Review, 96, 346–353.
Coppo, E.C., Caetano, R.S., de Lima, L.M., & et al. (2022). Student dropout prediction using 1d cnn-lstm with variational autoencoder oversampling. In: 2022 IEEE Latin American Conference on Computational Intelligence (LA-CCI), IEEE, pp 1–6
De Witte, K., Cabus, S., Thyssen, G., & et al. (2013). A critical review of the literature on school dropout. Educational Research Review, 10, 13–28.
El Aouifi, H., El Hajji, M., Es-Saady, Y., & et al. (2021). Predicting learner’s performance through video sequences viewing behavior analysis using educational data-mining. Education and Information Technologies, 26(5), 5799–5814.
Fayyad, U. (2005). Knowledge discovery in databases: An overview. In: Inductive Logic Programming: 7th International Workshop, ILP-97 Prague, Czech Republic September 17–20, 1997 Proceedings, Springer, pp 1–16
Graves, A., Mohamed, Ar., & Hinton, G. (2013). Speech recognition with deep recurrent neural networks. In: 2013 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing, Ieee, pp 6645–6649
Hegde, V., & Prageeth, P. (2018). Higher education student dropout prediction and analysis through educational data mining. In: 2nd International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC). IEEE, pp 694–699
Lee, S., & Chung, J. Y. (2019). The machine learning-based dropout early warning system for improving the performance of dropout prediction. Applied Sciences, 9(15), 3093.
Martins, M. V., Baptista, L., Machado, J., & et al. (2023). Multi-class phased prediction of academic performance and dropout in higher education. Applied Sciences, 13(8), 4702.
Mimis, M., El Hajji, M., Es-saady, Y., & et al. (2019). A framework for smart academic guidance using educational data mining. Education and Information Technologies, 24, 1379–1393.
Minn, S. (2020). Bkt-lstm: Efficient student modeling for knowledge tracing and student performance prediction. arXiv:2012.12218
Nagy, M., & Molontay, R. (2018). Predicting dropout in higher education based on secondary school performance. In: IEEE 22nd international conference on intelligent engineering systems (INES). IEEE, pp 000,389–000,394
Nascimento, R.L.Sd., Neves Junior, R.Bd., Almeida Neto, M.Ad., & et al. (2018). Educational data mining: An application of regressors in predicting school dropout. In: International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition. Springer, pp 246–257
Realinho, V., Machado, J., Baptista, L., & et al. (2021). Predict students’ dropout and academic success. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5777340
Sorensen, L. C. (2019). “big data” in educational administration: An application for predicting school dropout risk. Educational Administration Quarterly, 55(3), 404–446.
Von Hippel, P. T., & Hofflinger, A. (2021). The data revolution comes to higher education: identifying students at risk of dropout in chile. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 43(1), 2–23.
Willging, P. A., & Johnson, S. D. (2009). Factors that influence students’ decision to dropout of online courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 13(3), 115–127.
Wu, N., Zhang, L., Gao, Y., & et al. (2019). Clms-net: dropout prediction in moocs with deep learning. In: Proceedings of the ACM Turing Celebration Conference-China, pp 1–6
Xiong, F., Zou, K., Liu, Z., & et al. (2019). Predicting learning status in moocs using lstm. In: Proceedings of the ACM Turing Celebration Conference-China, pp 1–5
Yao, H., Wu, F., Ke, J., & et al. (2018). Deep multi-view spatial-temporal network for taxi demand prediction. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence
Yu, Y., Si, X., Hu, C., & et al. (2019). A review of recurrent neural networks: Lstm cells and network architectures. Neural computation, 31(7), 1235–1270.
Zheng, Y., Shao, Z., Deng, M., & et al. (2022). Mooc dropout prediction using a fusion deep model based on behaviour features. Computers and Electrical Engineering, 104(108), 409.
Funding
Not applicable
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
We declare that we have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
El Aouifi, H., El Hajji, M. & Es-Saady, Y. A hybrid approach for early-identification of at-risk dropout students using LSTM-DNN networks. Educ Inf Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12588-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12588-0