Finding students at high risk of poor academic performance as early as possible plays an important role in improving education quality. To do so, most existing studies have used the traditional machine learning algorithms to predict students’ achievement based on their behavior data, from which behavior features are extracted manually thanks to expert experience and knowledge. However, owing to an increase in the varieties and overall volume of behavioral data, it has become more and more challenging to identify high-quality handcrafted features. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning model that automatically extracts features from students’ multi-source heterogeneous behavior data to predict academic performance. The key innovation of this model is that it uses long short-term memory networks to capture inherent time-series features for each type of behavior, and it takes two-dimensional convolutional networks to extract correlation features among different behaviors. We conducted experiments with four types of daily behavior data from students of the university in Beijing. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep model method outperforms several machine learning algorithms.

Specialized services and management must understand students' behavioral patterns in a timely and accurate manner. Based on these patterns, we can make targeted rules, especially for unexpected patterns. To perform this type of work, a questionnaire method is usually used to collect data and analyze students' behavioral states. However, the effectiveness of this method is greatly influenced by the timeliness and validity of the feedback data. To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised ensemble clustering framework to use student behavioral data to discover behavioral patterns. Because the behavioral data produced by students on campus are available in real time without intentional bias, clustering analysis can be relatively efficient and reliable. The proposed framework extracts behavior features from the two perspectives of statistics and entropy and then combines density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and k-means algorithms to discover behavioral patterns. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we carry out experiments on six types of behavioral data produced by undergraduates in a university in Beijing and analyze the relationships between different behavioral patterns and students' grade point averages (GPAs). The results show that the framework can not only detect anomalous behavioral patterns but also find mainstream patterns. The findings from this research can assist student-related departments in providing better services and management, such as psychological consulting and academic guidance.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for graph structure learning and achieved excellent performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. Real-world graph networks imply complex and various semantic information and are often referred to as heterogeneous information networks (HINs). Previous GNNs have laboriously modeled heterogeneous graph networks with pairwise relations, in which the semantic information representation for learning is incomplete and severely hinders node embedded learning. Therefore, the conventional graph structure cannot satisfy the demand for information discovery in HINs. In this article, we propose an end-to-end hypergraph transformer neural network (HGTN) that exploits the communication abilities between different types of nodes and hyperedges to learn higher-order relations and discover semantic information. Specifically, attention mechanisms weigh the importance of semantic information hidden in original HINs to generate useful meta-paths. Meanwhile, our method develops a multi-scale attention module to aggregate node embeddings in higher-order neighborhoods. We evaluate the proposed model with node classification tasks on six datasets: DBLP, ACM, IBDM, Reuters, STUD-BJUT, and Citeseer. Experiments on a large number of benchmarks show the advantages of HGTN.

Students spend most of their time living and studying on campus, especially in Asia, and they form various types of associations in addition to those with classmates and roommates. It is necessary for university authorities to master these types of associations, so as to provide appropriate services, such as psychological guidance and academic advice. With the rapid development of the “smart campus,” many kinds of student behavior data are recorded, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to deeply analyze students’ associations. In this paper, we propose a visual analytic method to construct students’ association networks by computing the similarity of their behavior data. We discover student communities using the popular Louvain (or BGLL) algorithm, which can extract community structures based on modularity optimization. Using various visualization charts, we visualized associations among students so as to intuitively express them. We evaluated our method using the real behavior data of undergraduates in a university in Beijing. The experimental results indicate that this method is effective and intuitive for student association analysis.

KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems TIIS Paper Details

The increasing availability of fine-grained student behavior data on smart campuses offers significant opportunities for personalized education. However, traditional clustering methods applied to such structured data often fail to capture the semantic complexity of behavioral features and the relational dependencies among individuals. To address these dual challenges, we propose a deep unsupervised clustering framework that integrates Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Graph Attention Networks (GAT). Recognizing that raw numerical features lack contextual depth, our approach first transforms structured data into natural language profiles, leveraging a pretrained BERT model to extract semantically rich embeddings. These individual representations are situated within a student behavior graph, where a GAT module refines node features by capturing relational structures and inter-student similarities. The combined embeddings enhance the performance of multiple clustering algorithms in identifying distinct behavioral patterns across students. In addition, we introduce a hierarchical anomaly detection module that identifies both unstable behavior clusters and outlier individuals based on intra-cluster variance and local density, providing a solution for detecting anomalous patterns in student populations. Experimental results on real-world campus datasets demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness, while further analysis highlights its practical utility in uncovering early indicators of academic risk through interpretable behavioral modeling.