Abstract
Predictions of student performance are important to the education system as a whole, helping students to know how their learning is changing and adjusting teachers' and school policymakers' plans for their future growth. However, selecting meaningful features from the huge amount of educational data is challenging, so the dimensionality of student achievement features needs to be reduced. Based on this motivation, this paper proposes an improved Binary Snake Optimizer (MBSO) as a wrapped feature selection model, taking the Mat and Por student achievement data in the UCI database as an example, and comparing the MBSO feature selection model with other feature methods, the MBSO is able to select features with strong correlation to the students and the average number of student features selected reaches a minimum of 7.90 and 7.10, which greatly reduces the complexity of student achievement prediction. In addition, we propose the MDBO-BP-Adaboost model to predict students' performance. Firstly, the model incorporates the good point set initialization, triangle wandering strategy and adaptive t-distribution strategy to obtain the Modified Dung Beetle Optimization Algorithm (MDBO), secondly, it uses MDBO to optimize the weights and thresholds of the BP neural network, and lastly, the optimized BP neural network is used as a weak learner for Adaboost. MDBO-BP-Adaboost After comparing with XGBoost, BP, BP-Adaboost, and DBO-BP-Adaboost models, the experimental results show that the R(2) on the student achievement dataset is 0.930 and 0.903, respectively, which proves that the proposed MDBO-BP-Adaboost model has a better effect than the other models in the prediction of students' achievement with better results than other models.