Graphs regularized robust matrix factorization and its application on student grade prediction

Student grade prediction (SGP) is an important educational problem for designing personalized strategies of teaching and learning. Many studies adopt the technique of matrix factorization (MF). However, their methods often focus on the grade records regardless of the side information, such as backgrounds and relationships. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new MF method, called graph regularized robust matrix factorization (GRMF), based on the recent robust MF version. GRMF integrates two side graphs built on the side data of students and courses into the objective of robust low-rank MF. As a result, the learned features of students and courses can grasp more priors from educational situations to achieve higher grade prediction results. The resulting objective problem can be effectively optimized by the Majorization Minimization (MM) algorithm. In addition, GRMF not only can yield the specific features for the education domain but can also deal with the case of missing, noisy, and corruptive data. To verify our method, we test GRMF on two public data sets for rating prediction and image recovery. Finally, we apply GRMF to educational data from our university, which is composed of 1325 students and 832 courses. The extensive experimental results manifestly show that GRMF is robust to various data problem and achieves more effective features in comparison with other methods. Moreover, GRMF also delivers higher prediction accuracy than other methods on our educational data set. This technique can facilitate personalized teaching and learning in higher education.