Student’s marks prediction using python
By: Nisarg Satani
Tags: Python, Regression, Linear Regression, AI, Artificial Intelligence

In these era of machine learning and artificial intelligence we can now predict the marks of a student which is to be achieved in the next semester.

These will help teachers with the student’s performance. Teacher can ask their students to improve on a particular subject so that students can improve their performance.

Main objective is to help teachers analyze students performance easily.

Let’s move on where we get our hands dirty with the python.

Dataset used here is the UCI dataset of a portugese schools of secondary education student. Link of the dataset: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/student+ performance#

I have used 4 regression techniques which are as follows:

Linear Regression

Linear regression is used for finding linear relationship between target and one or more predictors. There are two types of linear regression- Simple and Multiple.

Advantages: Linear Regression is simple to implement and easier to interpret the output coefficients.

Disadvantages:On the other hand in linear regression technique outliers can have huge effects on the regression and boundaries are linear in this technique.

Random Forest Regressor

A random forest is a meta estimator that fits a number of classifying decision trees on various sub-samples of the dataset and uses averaging to improve the predictive accuracy and control over-fitting.

Advantages: Random Forest can be used to solve both classification as well as regression problems.

Disadvantages: Random Forest require much more time to train as compared to decision trees as it generates a lot of trees (instead of one tree in case of decision tree) and makes decision on the majority of votes.

Gradient Boosting Regression

Gradient Boosting is similar to AdaBoost in that they both use an ensemble of decision trees to predict a target label. Calculate the average of the target label. Calculate the residuals residual = actual value — predicted value.

Construct a decision tree

Predict the target label using all of the trees within the ensemble

Advantage: Lots of flexibility — can optimize on different loss functions and provides several hyperparameter tuning options that make the function fit very flexible.

Disadvantages: The high flexibility results in many parameters that interact and influence heavily the behavior of the approach (number of iterations, tree depth, regularization parameters, etc.). This requires a large grid search during tuning.

Bayesian Ridge

In the Bayesian viewpoint, we formulate linear regression using probability distributions rather than point estimates. The response, y, is not estimated as a single value but is assumed to be drawn from a probability distribution.

The aim of Bayesian Linear Regression is not to find the single “best” value of the model parameters, but rather to determine the posterior distribution for the model parameters.

Advantages: It’s good when you have a linear regression problem and want to use a Bayesian approach.

Disadvantages: It’s not great when you don’t have a regression problem, or if a linear model does not work well, or if you do not want a Bayesian approach.

These techniques are used to achieve more accurate result.

Software:

Google colab or jupyter notebook

Exploratory data analysis

Import the necessary libraries.

import numpy as np

import pandas as pd

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Load dataset

To see what our data set looks like use head function as shown below: