Abstract
In the past few years, educational data mining (EDM) has attracted the attention of researchers to enhance the quality of education. Predicting student academic performance is crucial to improving the value of education. Some research studies have been conducted which mainly focused on prediction of students' performance at higher education. However, research related to performance prediction at the secondary level is scarce, whereas the secondary level tends to be a benchmark to describe students' learning progress at further educational levels. Students' failure or poor grades at lower secondary negatively impact them at the higher secondary level. Therefore, early prediction of performance is vital to keep students on a progressive track. This research intended to determine the critical factors that affect the performance of students at the secondary level and to build an efficient classification model through the fusion of single and ensemble-based classifiers for the prediction of academic performance. Firstly, three single classifiers including a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), J48, and PART were observed along with three well-established ensemble algorithms encompassing Bagging (BAG), MultiBoost (MB), and Voting (VT) independently. To further enhance the performance of the abovementioned classifiers, nine other models were developed by the fusion of single and ensemble-based classifiers. The evaluation results showed that MultiBoost with MLP outperformed the others by achieving 98.7% accuracy, 98.6% precision, recall, and F-score. The study implies that the proposed model could be useful in identifying the academic performance of secondary level students at an early stage to improve the learning outcomes.