Discrimination-Aware Classifiers for Student Performance Prediction

In this paper we consider discrimination-aware classification of educational data. Mining and using rules that distinguish groups of students based on sensitive attributes such as gender and nationality may lead to discrimination. It is desirable to keep the sensitive attributes during the training of a classifier to avoid information loss but decrease the undesirable correlation between the sensitive attributes and the class attribute when building the classifier. We illustrate, motivate, and solve the problem, and present a case study for predicting student exam performance based on enrolment information and assessment results during the semester. We evaluate the performance of two discriminationaware classifiers and compare them with their non-discriminationaware counterparts. The results show that the discriminationaware classifiers are able to reduce discrimination with trivial loss in accuracy. The proposed method can help teachers to predict student performance accurately without discrimination.