Early Warning of College Students’ Ideological and Political Course Performance Using an Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

With the reform of teaching methods, hybrid online and offline teaching modes have been used increasingly in college courses. In this setting, the factors affecting academic performance are more complex, making it more challenging to predict students’ performance. Therefore, there is an urgent need for higher-performance prediction algorithms. This study briefly analyzed college students’ learning in ideological and political courses. Then, the learning features of college students in the courses were extracted using the Super Star platform and teaching system. Feature selection was carried out based on the information gain rate, while the training set was balanced using the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). Moreover, the seagull optimization algorithm (SOA) was applied to optimize the hyperparameters of eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to develop the SOA-XGBoost algorithm for early warning of performance. Experiments were performed on the collected datasets. It was found that the effect of the SOA-XGBoost algorithm on the early warning of performance improved significantly following SMOTE processing. The F1-value reached 0.955 and the area under the curve value was 0.976. The SOA exhibited superior performance in hyperparameter optimization compared with other algorithms such as the grid search. The SOA-XGBoost algorithm also achieved the best results in early warning of performance. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed SOA-XGBoost algorithm for early warning of performance, and the method can be widely applied in practice.