A Multi-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Student Graduation Prediction

Accurate prediction of student graduation status is crucial for higher education institutions to implement timely interventions and improve student success. While existing methods often rely on single data sources or generic model architectures, this paper proposes a novel Multi-Branch Convolutional Neural Network (MBCNN) that systematically integrates multi-dimensional factors influencing student outcomes. The model employs eight dedicated branches to capture both subjective and objective features from four key dimensions: student characteristics, school resources, family environment, and societal factors. Through robust normalization and hierarchical feature fusion, MBCNN effectively learns discriminative representations from these heterogeneous data sources. Evaluated on a real-world dataset from Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, our approach demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional and up-to-date machine learning methods, achieving improvements of 4.07–17.35% in accuracy, 4.60–20.19% in weighted precision, 4.07–17.35% in weighted recall, and 4.59–18.73% in weighted F1-score. The results validate that domain-specific neural architectures, designed to align with the inherent structure of educational data, significantly enhance prediction accuracy and generalization capability.