Using machine learning algorithms to predict first-generation college students’ six-year graduation: a case study

This paper studies the forecasting mechanism of the most widely used machine learning algorithms, namely linear discriminant analysis, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, artificial neural network, naive Bayes, classification and regression trees, support vector machines, adaptive boosting, and stacking ensemble model, in forecasting first-generation college students’ six-year graduation using the first college year’s data. Five standard evaluating metrics are used to evaluate these models. The results show that these machine learning models can significantly predict first-generation college students’ six-year graduation with mean forecasting accuracy rate spanning from 69.58% to 75.17% and median forecasting accuracy rate spanning from 70.37% to 74.52%. Among these machine learning algorithms, stacking ensemble model, logistic regression model, and linear discriminant analysis are the best three ones in terms of mean forecasting accuracy rate. Furthermore, the results from the repeated ten-fold cross-validation process reveal that the variations of the five evaluating metrics exhibit remarkably different patterns across the ten machine learning algorithms.