Student Dropout Prediction

Francesca Del Bonifro1,2 , Maurizio Gabbrielli1,2 , Giuseppe Lisanti1 ,

and Stefano Pio Zingaro1,2(B)
1
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
[email protected]
2
INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France

Abstract. Among the many open problems in the learning process,

students dropout is one of the most complicated and negative ones, both
for the student and the institutions, and being able to predict it could
help to alleviate its social and economic costs. To address this problem
we developed a tool that, by exploiting machine learning techniques,
allows to predict the dropout of a first-year undergraduate student. The
proposed tool allows to estimate the risk of quitting an academic course,
and it can be used either during the application phase or during the first
year, since it selectively accounts for personal data, academic records
from secondary school and also first year course credits. Our experiments
have been performed by considering real data of students from eleven
schools of a major University.

Keywords: Machine learning · Educational data mining · Decision

support tools

1 Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is changing many aspects of our society and our lives since
it provides the technological basis for new services and tools that help decision
making in everyday life. Education is not immune to this revolution. Indeed AI
and machine learning tools can help to improve in several ways the learning
process. A critical aspect in this context is the possibility of developing new
predictive tools which can be used to help students improve their academic
careers.
Among the many different observable phenomena in the students’ careers,
University dropout is one of the most complex and adverse events, both for
students or institutions. A dropout is a potentially devastating event in the life
of a student, and it also impacts negatively the University from an economic
point of view [6]. Furthermore, it could also be a signal of potential issues in the
organisation and the quality of the courses. Dropout prediction is a task that can
be addressed by exploiting machine learning techniques, which already proved to
be effective in the field of education for evaluating students’ performance [1,6,8–
10].

c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

I. I. Bittencourt et al. (Eds.): AIED 2020, LNAI 12163, pp. 129–140, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52237-7_11
130 F. Del Bonifro et al.

In this work, we face the challenge of early predicting the dropout for a
freshman by adopting a data-driven approach. Trough an automated learning
process, we aim to develop a model that is capable of capturing information
concerning the particular context in which dropout takes place.
We built our model by taking into account the following three design prin-
ciples. First, we want to estimate the risk of quitting an academic course at an
early stage, either before the student starts the course or during the first year.
Statistical evidence shows that this time frame is one of the most critical periods
for dropout. Targeting first-year students means that the data we can use to train
our predictive models are only personal information and academic records from
high school—e.g. gender, age, high school education, final mark — and the num-
ber of credits acquired during the first months of the first year. Second, we do
not focus on a specific predictive model; instead, we conducted a thorough study
considering several machine learning techniques in order to construct a baseline
and assess the challenge of the problem under analysis. Last, we conducted the
training and test processes on real data, collecting samples of approximately
15,000 students from a specific academic year of a major University.
The remainder of this paper has the following structure. Related approaches
are discussed in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3 we describe the machine learning methods used
in our analysis, the dataset we collected and the preprocessing techniques applied
to it. In Sect. 4 we evaluate the selected models by comparing their performance:
first, with the different values of the models’ parameters; second, to the features
used in the train and test sets and, finally, considering each academic school
separately. Then, we draw final remarks in Sect. 5 and present possible uses and
extensions of this work.

2 Related Work

Several papers recently addressed the prediction of students’ performances

employing machine learning techniques. In the case of University-level educa-
tion [14] and [1] have designed machine learning models, based on different
datasets, performing analysis similar to ours even though they use different fea-
tures and assumptions. In [1] a balanced dataset, including features mainly about
the student provenance, is used to train different machine learning models. Tests
report accuracy, true positive rate and AUC-ROC measures. Also in [11] there is
a study in this direction but using a richer set of features involving family status
and life conditions for each student. The authors used a Fuzzy-ARTMAP Neu-
ral Network gaining competitive performances. Moreover, as in our case, they
performed the predictions using data at enrollment time. In [12] a set of features
similar to the previous work is exploited. An analysis with different classifica-
tion algorithms from the WEKA environment is performed, in order to find the
best model for solving this kind of problem. It turns out that in this case the
algorithm ID3 reaches the best performance with respect to the classification
task.
 Student Dropout Prediction 131

Another work on the University dropout phenomenon was proposed in [7].

The proposed solution aim at predicting the student dropout but using a com-
pletely different representation for the students. In fact, the approach exploits
data acquisition by web cams, eye-trackers and other similar devices in the con-
text of a smart class. Based on these data, it is possible to perform emotion
analysis and detection for the students in the room which will be then exploited
to predict the dropout. There also exist studies related to high school educa-
tion [10]. However, in this case, different countries have quite different high
school systems, for example, the duration of the high school and the voting
system can vary a lot among countries. Due to these differences, datasets from
different countries can have very different meanings and, even if they include
similar features, these are describing quite different situations. For this reason,
works on lower levels of education are much less general and exportable to other
systems. On the contrary, University systems are more similar, or it is possible
to easily “translate” a system into another. Predictive models for students’ final
performance in the context of blended education, partially exploiting online plat-
forms [9] or entirely online University courses [8,15], have also been proposed.
In these cases, the presence of the technological devices allows the use of an
augmented set of data—e.g. consulting homework submission logs—which can
improve the quality of the models. However, the aim of these approaches is
different from the proposed solution. In fact, besides the analysis of the corre-
lations between the features and the students’ performances discovered by the
machine learning models, we propose to exploit the prediction at the moment
of the students’ enrolment in order to prevent the problematic situations that
can bring to the dropout occurrences. Prediction at application-time is one of
our main contribution, in fact a model exploiting data which are available after
the enrolment—e.g. considering the students’ performances and behaviour at
the University—is certainly more accurate, but the timing for the suggestions is
not optimal. Considering to take more courses or to change academic path while
the mandatory courses at the University have already started could be highly
frustrating for the students and do not enhance motivation in continuing their
studies. Another important point in our work is the fact that we aim to perform
a careful analysis of fair results with respect to the statistical characteristics
of the dataset (in particular dealing with the unbalanced data). On the other
hand, most of the previous works while mentioning the problem do not focus
on how this unbalance affects the exploited models and may produce misleading
results, and often dot not provide a clear justifications for the best performance
measures on real data affected by this problem. This lack of extensive statisti-
cal analysis and evaluation of the limits and risks of the developed models has
also been highlighted in [5], an excellent survey of different techniques for the
students’ performances prediction and related considerations.

3 Methodology
We considered a specific set of well-known classification algorithms to provide a
tool enabling a reasonably accurate prediction of the dropout phenomenon. In
132 F. Del Bonifro et al.

particular, we considered the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vec-

tor Machine (SVM) [3] and Random Forest (RF), as they are the most commonly
used models in literature to solve similar problems.
LDA acts as a dimensional reduction algorithm, trying to reduce the data
complexity, i.e. by projecting the actual feature space on a lower-dimensional one,
while trying to retain relevant information; also, it does not involve parameter
settings. SVM is a well-established technique for data classification and regression.
It finds the best separating hyper-plane by maximising the margin in the feature
space. The training data participating in the maximisation process are called
support vectors. RF builds a collection of tree-structured classifiers combining
them randomly. It has been adopted in the literature for a great variety of
regression and prediction tasks [2].
We verified our methodology in three steps, providing a proper set of evalua-
tion measures as we discuss later in this section. First, we assessed the different
classifiers performance for the model parameters. In our case, we validated the
SVM model over seven different values of C, that is the regularisation parame-
ter, and we analysed the behaviour of four number of estimators in the case of
RF. Moreover, we performed each validation considering two different re-scaling
techniques of the data instances. Second, we evaluated the classifiers over three
training sets that considered different features. For LDA, RF and SVM we only
kept the best parameters’ choice and monitored their performance on the differ-
ent datasets.

Dataset. The dataset used for this work has been extracted from a collection
of real data. More precisely, we considered pseudo-anonymized data describing
15, 000 students enrolled in several courses of the academic year 2016/2017.
The decision to focus our research within the limit of the first year lies in the
analysis of statistical evidence from the source data. This evidence indicates a
concentration of career dropouts in the first year of the course and a progressive
decrease of the phenomenon in the following years. More specifically, students
who leave within the first year is 14.8% of the total registered, while those who
leave by the third year is 21.6%. This is equivalent to saying that the 6.8%
of registered abandoned in subsequent years compared with 14.8% who leaves
during the first year; confirming the importance of acting within the first year
of the program to prevent the dropout phenomenon.
Table 1 shows a detailed description of the information available in the
dataset. The first column lists the name of the features, while the second column
describes the possible values or range. The first two features represent personal
data of students while the third and the fourth are information related to the
high school attended by the student.
Concerning the Age feature, its three possible values represent three different
ranges of ages at the moment of enrolment, the value 1 is assigned to students
until 19 years old, 2 for student’s age between 20 and 23 years, and 3 other-
wise. The values of High school id indicate ten different kinds of high school
where the student obtained the diploma.The High school final mark represents
 Student Dropout Prediction 133

Table 1. Available features for each student in the original dataset, along with the
possible values range

Feature Value range

Student gender 1, 2
Student age range 1 to 3
High school id 1 to 10
High school final mark 60 to 100
Additional Learning Requirements 1, 2, 3
Academic school Id 1 to 11
Course Credits 0 to 60
Dropout 0, 1

the mark that the student received when graduating in high school. The flag
Additional Learning Requirements (ALR) represents the possibility for manda-
tory additional credits in the first academic year. In fact, some degree programs
present an admission test; if failed, the student has to attend some further spe-
cific courses and has to pass the relative examinations (within a given deadline)
in order to be able to continue in that program. The values for the ALR feature
indicate three possible situations: the value one is used to describe degree pro-
grams without ALR; the value two stands for an ALR examination that has been
passed while the value three indicates that the student failed to pass the ALR
examination, although it was required. Academic school id represents the aca-
demic school chosen by the student: there are eleven possible schools according
to the present dataset. Course Credits indicates the number of credits acquired
by the students. We use this attribute only in the case in which we evaluate the
students already enrolled, and we consider only those credits acquired before the
end of the first year, in order to obtain indications on the situation of the stu-
dent before the condition of abandonment arises. The Boolean attribute Dropout
represents the event of a student who abandons the degree course. This feature
also represents the class for the supervised classification task and the outcome
of the inference process—i.e. the prediction. Since the dropout assumes values
True (1) or False (0), the problem treated in this work is a binary classification
one.
It is possible to evaluate the amount of relevant information contained in the
presented features by computing the Information Gain for each of them. This
quantity is based on the concept of entropy, and it is usually exploited to build
decision trees, but it also permits to obtain a ranked list of the available features
for their relevance. In our case, some of the most relevant ones are (in descending
order) ALR, High school final mark, High school Id, Academic school Id.

Data Preprocessing. We describe the preprocessing phase, used to clean the

data as much as possible in order to maximise their exploitation in the prediction
134 F. Del Bonifro et al.

task. Firstly, we observed that in the original dataset, some of the values contain
an implicit ordering that is not representative of the feature itself and can bias
the model. These are the High school id, Academic school id, and ALR. We
represent these three features as categorical—and thus not as numerical—by
transforming each value, adopting a One-hot encoding representation. As one
can expect, the dataset is highly unbalanced since the students who abandon the
enrolled course is a minority, less than 12.3%; in particular, the ratio between the
negative (non-dropout) and positive (dropout) examples is around 7 : 1. Even
though this is good for the educational institution, training a machine learning
model for binary classification with a highly unbalanced dataset may result in
poor final performance, mainly because in such a scenario the classifier would
underestimate the class with a lower number of samples [16]. For this reason, we
randomly select half of the negative samples (i.e., the students who effectively
drop) and use it in the train set; an equal number of instances of the other class
is randomly sampled from the dataset and added to the train set. In doing so, we
obtain a balanced train set, which is used to train the supervised models. The
remaining samples constitute an unbalanced test set which we use to measure
the performance of the trained models. This procedure is repeated ten times and
for each one of these trials we randomise the selection and keep balanced the
number of samples for the two classes in the train set. The final evaluation is
obtained by averaging the results of the ten trials on the test sets.

Feature Selection and Evaluation Metrics. Concretely, the first group of

features that we select is composed by gender, age range, high school, high school
final mark, and academic school. We referred to this set of features as the “basic”
set. We performed the other validations by adding to the “basic” set the remain-
ing features incrementally, first, ALR (basic + ALR) and then CC (basic + ALR
+ CC ). In this way, we were able to check the actual relevance of each feature.
Third, considering the best configuration from the analysis above, the perfor-
mance for each academic school separately has been analysed.
Several evaluation metrics can be used to asses the quality of the classifiers
both in the process of selecting the best hyper-parameter configuration and in
ranking the different models. The classification produces True Positive (TP), True
Negative (TN), False positive (FP) and False Negative (FN) values; in our case,
we interpret an FP as the prediction of a dropout that does not occur, and an
FN as a student which accordingly to the model’s prediction will continue the
studies while the dropout phenomenon actually occurs.
In the case of binary classification, accuracy (ACC), specificity (SPEC), and
sensitivity (SENS) are used instead of plain TP, TN, FP and FN values to improve
experimental results interpretability [4]. ACC is the ratio between correct predic-
tions over the total number of instances. SPEC, or True Negative Rate (TNR), is
the ratio of TN to the total number of instances that have actual negative class.
SENS, also known as recall or True Positive Rate (TPR), is the ratio of TP to the
total number of instances that have actual positive class.
 Student Dropout Prediction 135

Fig. 1. Results obtained: (a) using RFs with an increasing number of estimators with-
out rescaling the data; (b) using SVM for different values of C without rescaling the
data; (c) using SVM for different values of C with standard rescaling; (d) using SVM
for different values of C with min-max rescaling.

4 Experimental Result
All the experiments have been performed using the Python programming lan-
guage (version 3.7) and the scikit-learn framework [13] (version 0.22.1),
which provides access to the implementation of several machine learning algo-
rithms. Training and testing run on a Linux Workstation equipped with Xeon
8-Core 2,1 Ghz processor and 96 GB of memory.

Parameters Selection and Data Scaling. We performed a set of experiments

in order to find the best parameters configuration for SVM, and RF. Tests with
SVM have been conducted by progressively increasing the penalty term C, rang-
ing over the following set: {1E −04 , 1E −03 , 1E −02 , 1E −01 , 1E +00 , 1E +01 , 1E +02 }.
The same applies to the value for the number of estimators in RF algo-
rithm, ranging over the set {1E +00 , 1E +01 , 1E +02 , 1E +03 }. We observe, from
Fig. 1, that the best results for both accuracy and sensitivity are obtained with
C = 1E −01 and with a number of estimators = 1E +03 . In addition, we assessed
whether our dataset may benefit from data re-scaling or not. For this reason, we
performed standard and min-max scaling on the data before training to evaluate
their effectiveness for the original data—i.e., without scaling. Standard scale acts
on numerical data values transforming for each numerical feature the original
values distribution into another one with mean equal to zero and standard devi-
ation equal to one, assuming that the values are normally distributed. Min-Max
scaling aims to transform the range of possible values for each numerical feature
from the original one to [0, 1] or [−1, 1]. Both standard scaling and min-max
scaling are computed on the train set and applied to the test set. We observed
that the scaling has no effect on the final performance of LDA and RF. On the
contrary, as shown in Fig. 1 the scaling does affect the performance of SVM but
it does not seem to add any benefit. This may be related to the fact that most
of the features are categorical. For this reason we chose not to re-scale the data
in the following tests.
136 F. Del Bonifro et al.

Features Analysis. Table 2 shows the results obtained considering different

features combinations while keeping the SVM and RF parameters as described
in the previous section and without data rescaling.
Considering the basic set of features LDA and SVM obtain the highest per-
formance with a slightly larger variance for the SVM results. The introduction of
the ALR feature mainly improves the accuracy and specificity for the LDA and
SVM, but it drops the sensitivity. On the contrary, the introduction of the ALR
feature in RF helps improving the final performance across all the measures,
obtaining a higher performance compared to the results of LDA and SVM on
the basic set of features.
The relevant gain here is that this work permits to estimate the risk of
the dropout at the application time (for the basic and the basic+ALR features
cases), i.e. before the students’ enrolment and examination—which can give a
clear indication about the future academic performances. We believe that this
possibility is significant since appropriate policy and measures to counter the
dropout should be taken by universities very early, possibly at the very beginning
of the academic career, in order to maximise the student success probability and
to reduce costs.
Finally, when considering the CC feature, all the models reach very high
performance, with slightly higher results for SVM. However this feature is not
available at application time.

Dropout Analysis per Academic School. The results in Table 2 are useful to
understand the general behavior of the predictive model, but it may be difficult
for governance to extract useful information. The division of results by academic
school allows an analysis of the performance of the models with higher resolution.
This could be an important feature that facilitates local administrations (those
of schools) to interpret the results that concern students of their degree courses.
In Table 2, we have selected the best models from those trained with basic +
ALR and basic + ALR + CC features. These are RF for the former and SVM for
the latter. The results divided by school are shown in Table 3.
For completeness, we report in Fig. 2 an overview of the dataset composition
with respect to the school (horizontal axis) and the number of samples (vertical
axis), divided by dropouts, in green, and the remaining, in blue. The results of
Table 3 highlight a non-negligible variability between the results for each school
and suggests that each school contributes differently to the predictive model.
For instance, the results for schools 4, 9, and 10 are higher than those of schools
3, 7, and 8 and all of these schools show results that differ significantly from the
general ones (Table 2), both for basic + ALR and basic + ALR + CC. In this
case, the number of dropout samples for schools 4, 9, and 10 is 207, 66, and 231
examples—504, in total—respectively, against the number of dropout samples
for schools 3, 7, and 8 which is respectively of 76, 63, and 89 examples—139,
in total.
 Student Dropout Prediction 137

Table 2. Experimental results for LDA, SVM and RF classifiers over different feature sets.

Set Model ACC SENS SPEC

Basic LDA 0.62 (±0.01) 0.64 (±0.01) 0.62 (±0.01)
SVM 0.62 (±0.02) 0.65 (±0.02) 0.62 (±0.02)
RF 0.56 (±0.01) 0.58 (±0.01) 0.56 (±0.01)
+ ALR LDA 0.75 (±0.01) 0.59 (±0.02) 0.76 (±0.02)
SVM 0.81 (±0.03) 0.50 (±0.06) 0.83 (±0.04)
RF 0.63 (±0.01) 0.63 (±0.01) 0.63 (±0.01)
+ CC LDA 0.85 (±0.00) 0.90 (±0.00) 0.85 (±0.00)
SVM 0.87 (±0.00) 0.87 (±0.01) 0.87 (±0.01)
RF 0.87 (±0.01) 0.85 (±0.01) 0.87 (±0.01)

Fig. 2. Number of students per school. Green represents dropout students, blue repre-
sents the students which applied to the second academic year. (Color figure online)

Table 3. Experimental results for each academic school: (left) RF model trained using
Basic + ALR features; (right) SVM model trained using Basic + ALR + CC features.

School Random Forest (N = 1E +03 ) SVM (C = 1E −01 )

ACC SENS SPEC ACC SENS SPEC
1 0.61 (±0.05) 0.67 (±0.08) 0.61 (±0.06) 0.86 (±0.01) 0.99 (±0.01) 0.85 (±0.01)
2 0.74 (±0, 03) 0.63 (±0.07) 0.74 (±0.03) 0.91 (±0.01) 0.84 (±0, 01) 0.92 (±0.01)
3 0.45 (±0.04) 0.71 (±0.09) 0.44 (±0.04) 0.84 (±0.02) 0.73 (±0.01) 0.85 (±0.02)
4 0.71 (±0.03) 0.77 (±0.05) 0.70 (±0.03) 0.84 (±0.01) 0.93 (±0.01) 0.83 (±0.01)
5 0.68 (±0.03) 0.56 (±0.05) 0.68 (±0.04) 0.83 (±0.01) 0.91 (±0.01) 0.83 (±0.01)
6 0.58 (±0.03) 0.66 (±0.03) 0.57 (±0.03) 0.86 (±0.01) 0.88 (±0.01) 0.86 (±0.01)
7 0.49 (±0.09) 0.55 (±0.12) 0.49 (±0.10) 0.91 (±0.01) 0.90 (±0.03) 0.91 (±0.01)
8 0.60 (±0.03) 0.46 (±0.06) 0.61 (±0.03) 0.87 (±0.02) 0.87 (±0.05) 0.87 (±0.03)
9 0.80 (±0.03) 0.71 (±0.04) 0.80 (±0.04) 0.94 (±0.01) 0.93 (±0.01) 0.94 (±0.01)
10 0.44 (±0.04) 0.71 (±0.03) 0.41 (±0.04) 0.77 (±0.02) 0.94 (±0.01) 0.76 (±0.02)
11 0.61 (±0.02) 0.64 (±0.03) 0.61 (±0.02) 0.89 (±0.01) 0.83 (±0.01) 0.90 (±0.01)
138 F. Del Bonifro et al.

5 Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, we have presented an analysis of different machine learning tech-
niques applied to the task of dropout occurrences prediction for university stu-
dents. The analysis has been conducted on data available at the moment of the
enrolment at the first year of a bachelor or single-cycle degree. The analysis made
on the model performance takes into account the actual statistical composition
of the dataset, which is highly unbalanced to the classes. Considering predictions
at the moment of enrolment increases the difficulty of the task (because there are
less informative and available data since we cannot use data from the University
careers of students) compared to most of the existing approaches. Despite these
difficulties, this different approach makes it possible to use the tool in order to
actively improve the student’s academic situation from the beginning and not
only to make predictions and monitoring during the academic career. On the
other hand, we also performed a set of tests considering the credits obtained
by a students after a certain period of time. As one can expect, this helps in
largely improving the final performance of the model. This fact can be used by
the institution to decide whether to act as early as possible, on the basis of
the information available at enrolment time, or to wait for some more data in
the first year thus obtaining more accurate predictions. In any case, the results
obtained show that starting from data without any pedagogical or didactic value,
our tool can practically help in the attempt to mitigate the dropout problem.
We designed the tool in such a way that the integration with other com-
ponents can occur seamlessly. Indeed, we aim to extend it to a more general
monitoring system, to be used by the University governance, which can moni-
tor students careers and can provide helpful advice when critical situations are
encountered. For example, if the tool predicts that for a new cohort of students
enrolled in a specific degree program there are many possible dropouts, then
specific support services (such as supplementary support courses, personalised
guidance, etc) could be organised. We hope and believe that this can be an
effective way to decrease the dropout rate in the future years and to avoid the
phenomenon since the very beginning of the University careers of the students.
The first natural step in our work is the integration of our tool with other Uni-
versity services as described before. Next we would like to monitor the dropout
frequency in the coming years in order to obtain some hint about the effec-
tiveness of our tool. The outcomes of this analysis could guide us to improve
the deployment of the tool—e.g. by using different, more robust strategies. To
improve the model effectiveness it could also be useful to make predictions for dif-
ferent courses possibly within the same school, possibly integrating this with an
appropriate definition of a similarity measure between courses. Another further
development could be the inclusion of more data about student performances, for
example by considering the results of activities done in Learning Management
Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) such as, for example,
Moodle, Google Classroom, Edmodo, that could be used in the courses man-
agement and organisation. A limitation in our study is in the fact that the tool
take advantage of sensitive data, so one has to be very careful with using the
 Student Dropout Prediction 139

classifier, since there is no evidence of the model fairness—e.g., concerning the

gender feature.
Finally, given the increasing attention gathered by deep learning models, we
would like to extend our analysis in order to include these methods and consider
several factors, such as: the depth of the network (e.g., the number of layers) the
dimension of each layer, etc.

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