Developing a Bayesian Network Model to Predict Students’ Performance Based on the Analysis of their Higher Education Trajectory

dc.contributor.authorRamaano, Thabo Victor
dc.contributor.supervisorJadhav, Ashwini
dc.contributor.supervisorAjoodha, Ritesh
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-17T11:33:14Z
dc.date.issued2024-08
dc.descriptionA dissertation submitted in fulfillment for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science (Research), to the Faculty of Science, School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024
dc.description.abstractThe Admission Point Score (APS) metric, utilised as a response to admit prospective students for an academic course, may appear effective in determining student success. In reality, almost 50% of students admitted to a science programme in a higher education institution failed to meet all the requirements necessary to complete the programme during the period of 2008 and 2015. This had a direct impact on the overall graduation throughput. Thus, the focus of this research was geared towards the adoption of a probabilistic graphical approach to advocate its mechanism as a viable alternative to the APS metric when determining student success trajectories at a higher education level. The purpose of this approach was to provide higher education institutions with a system to monitor students’ academic performance en-route to graduation from a probabilistic and graphical point of view. This research employed a probability distribution distance metric to ascertain how close the learned models were to the true model for varying sample sizes. The significance of these results addressed the need for knowledge discovery of dependencies that existed between the students’ module results in a higher education trajectory that spans three years.
dc.description.submitterMMM2025
dc.facultyFaculty of Science
dc.identifier0000-0002-5484-7149
dc.identifier.citationRamaano, Thabo Victor. (2024). Developing a Bayesian Network Model to Predict Students’ Performance Based on the Analysis of their Higher Education Trajectory. [Master's dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WIReDSpace. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/45150
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/45150
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
dc.rights©2024 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
dc.rights.holderUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
dc.schoolSchool of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
dc.subjectBayesian network
dc.subjectHigher education trajectory
dc.subjectHill-climbing structure learning algorithm
dc.subjectKullback-Leibler divergence
dc.subjectVariable elimination inference algorithm
dc.subjectUCTD
dc.subject.primarysdgSDG-4: Quality education
dc.titleDeveloping a Bayesian Network Model to Predict Students’ Performance Based on the Analysis of their Higher Education Trajectory
dc.typeDissertation

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