Abstract
Student engagement is a flexible, complicated concept that includes behavioural, emotional, and cognitive involvement. In order for the instructor to understand how the student interacts with the various activities in the classroom, it is essential to predict their participation. The current work aims to identify the best algorithm for predicting student engagement in the classroom. In this paper, we gathered data from VLE and prepared them using a variety of data preprocessing techniques, including the elimination of missing values, normalization, encoding, and identification of outliers. On our data, we ran a number of machine learning (ML) classification algorithms, and we assessed each one using cross-validation methods and many helpful indicators. The performance of the model is evaluated with metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC scores. The results show that the CATBoost model is having higher accuracy than the rest. This proposed model outperformed in all the aspects compared to previous research. The results part of this paper indicates that the CATBoost model had an accuracy of approximately 92.23%, a precision of 94.40%, a recall of 100%, and an AUC score of 0.9624. The XGBoost predictive model, the random forest model, and the multilayer perceptron model all demonstrated approximately the same performance overall. We compared the AISAR model with Our model achieved an accuracy of 94.64% compared with AISAR 91% model and it concludes that our results are better. The AISAR model had only around 50% recall compared to our models, which had around 92%. This shows that our models return more relevant results, i.e., if our models predict that a student has high engagement, they are correct 94.64% of the time.