Multi-class LDA classifier and CNN feature extraction for student performance analysis during Covid-19 pandemic

In our modern world, education is essential for developing high moral values and excellence in individuals. But the spread of Covid-19 widely affects the student’s education, the majority of students have continued their education via online learning platforms. The academic performance of students has been sluggish across the globe during this pandemic. This problem is solved using a multiclass Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model which predicts the student learning rate and behavior. This research aims to classify the students’ performance into low, medium, and high grades in order to assist tutors in predicting the low-ranking students. The student data log is collected from the Kaggle student performance analysis dataset and pre-processed to remove the noise and non-redundance data. By analyzing the pre-processed data, the CNN extracts feature that are based on student interest and subjective pattern sequences. Then extracted features are filtered by the Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance(mRMR) method. mRMR selects the best features and dilutes the least one which handles each feature separately. The feature weights are measured by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and updated for better feature learning by CNN. At the last stage, the Multi-class LDA classifier evaluates the result into categorized classes. Based on the prediction, the tutors can easily find the low ranks of students who need a high preference for improving their academic performance. Experiments showed that the proposed model achieves greater accuracy (96.5%), precision (094), recall (092), F-score (095), and requires less computation time than existing methods.