Improved SVM Classification Using Particle Swarm Optimization for Student Completion Prediction System

Timely completion of a study program is crucial for evaluating the quality of universities. To achieve timely completion, student’s progress needs to be monitored early in order to ensure that they can complete the given task on time. This process is particularly important because universities often enroll thousands of students, thereby making individual supervision impractical. An effective solution to this problem is leveraging machine learning to develop a system that predicts whether student will complete the study without delay. Therefore, this study used Support Vector Machine (SVM) method for classification, with RBF kernel. Optimization of SVM classification was achieved by ensuring the values for Soft Margin C parameter and kernel parameter were correct. In addition, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method was used to determine the optimal SVM parameter values. Consequently, the resulting model was evaluated using Cross Fold Validation. The optimized SVM parameter identified through PSO were gamma of 0.0085 and C of 0.4196. The average training accuracy recorded is 82.58%, with 81.22% validation, these results can be categorized into Good Classification. Finally, the application of PSO in optimization resulted in SVM models that avoided overfitting, as shown by the closeness of training and validation values.