Predicting and Mitigating Freshmen Student Attrition: A Local-Explainable Machine Learning Framework

With the emergence of novel methods for improving machine learning (ML) transparency, traditional decision-support-focused information systems seem to need an upgrade in their approach toward providing more actionable insights for practitioners. Particularly, given the complex decision-making process of humans, using insights obtained from group-level interpretation of ML models for designing individual interventions may lead to mixed results. The present study proposes a hybrid ML framework by integrating established predictive and explainable ML approaches for decision support systems involving the prediction of human decisions and designing individualized interventions accordingly. The proposed framework is aimed at providing actionable insights for designing individualized interventions. It was showcased in the context of college students’ attrition problem using a large and feature-rich integrated data set of freshman college students containing information about their demographics, educational, financial, and socioeconomic factors. A comparison of feature importance scores at the group- vs. individual-level revealed that while group-level insights might be useful for adjusting long-term strategies, using them as a one-size-fits-all strategy to design and implement individual interventions is subject to suboptimal outcomes.