Student Desertion Prediction Using Kernel Relevance Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a kernel-based relevance analysis to support student desertion prediction. Our approach, termed KRA-SD, is twofold: (i) A feature ranking based on centered kernel alignment to match demographic, academic, and biopsychosocial measures with the output labels (deserter/not deserter), and (ii) classification stage based on k-nearest neighbors and support vector machines to predict the desertion. For concrete testing, the student desertion database of the Universidad Tecnologica de Pereira is employed to assess the KRA-SD under a training, validation, and testing scheme. Attained results show that the proposed approach can recognize the main features related to the student desertion achieving an 85.64% of accuracy. Therefore, the proposed system aims to serve as a handy tool for planning strategies to prevent students from leaving the university without finishing their studies.