EducationClassical-SupervisedProven/Commodity

Prediction of Students’ Academic Performance using XGBoost vs Random Forest

This is like having two different “weather apps” for grades. Both look at a student’s past behavior and background (attendance, homework, test scores, etc.) and try to forecast how well they will do in the future. The paper compares which forecasting engine—XGBoost or Random Forest—does a better job at predicting students’ academic performance.

9.5
Quality
Score

Executive Brief

Business Problem Solved

Universities and schools struggle to identify which students are likely to underperform or drop out early enough to intervene. Manually spotting at‑risk students from many variables (grades, attendance, demographics) is slow and often inaccurate. This work evaluates two machine-learning methods to more accurately predict student performance from existing data, enabling earlier, data-driven interventions.

Value Drivers

Earlier identification of at‑risk students for targeted supportImproved retention and graduation ratesMore efficient allocation of tutoring and advising resourcesData-driven program evaluation and policy decisions

Technical Analysis

Model Strategy

Classical-ML (Scikit/XGBoost)

Data Strategy

Feature Store

Implementation Complexity

Medium (Integration logic)

Scalability Bottleneck

Feature engineering quality and labeled historical data coverage (data sparsity, bias, and drift across cohorts).

Market Signal

Adoption Stage

Early Majority

Differentiation Factor

Focuses specifically on head-to-head performance comparison of XGBoost and Random Forest for academic performance prediction in education, informing which off-the-shelf classical ML method may be better suited for student-risk modeling rather than proposing a novel algorithm.