Understanding the Impact of Socioeconomic Factors on Academic Performance Using Bayesian Networks

Education and school plays a fundamental role in our society, shaping an individual's future opportunities, nonetheless, not all students studies on equal terms. Socioeconomic factors like, parental education and school choice, are external factors which may influence educational outcomes. Understanding how these factors interact with each other is essential for creating fairer education, but also for educators and policy makers to design more effective support systems. Previous research on the relationships between socioeconomic factors and academic performance highlights the complexity of the topic and often calls for further analysis. This study explores these socioeconomic factors and their relationships by applying Bayesian network, a method which excels at learning causal relationships to gain deeper understanding in uncertain domains, as well as its graphical nature, allowing for intuitive interpretations. Bayesian networks seems to have been underutilized in this field of research, and thus, this study aims to gain more general knowledge about the problem domain by deploying this method. Our resulting network structure suggest that factors like, parental education, study time, school choice and the students intention on taking a higher level of education have an impact on their grade. While this study offers valuable insight into the domain, further research is deemed necessary.