Analysis of Student Academic Performance Using Random Forest and Support Vector Machines

Assessing student academic performance objectively remains a challenge at SMP Negeri 16 Bogor due to diverse internal and external factors in student records. This study aims to compare the classification performance of the Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms using a dataset of 403 students containing demographic, socioeconomic, and school-related attributes. Although the attributes are not traditional academic indicators (e.g., assignment or exam scores), they are used to explore whether non-academic features can contribute to predictive models. Following data preprocessing—handling missing values, encoding categorical variables, and managing class imbalance—both algorithms were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and confusion matrix analysis. Results show that SVM outperforms Random Forest with 78.00% accuracy, 89.98% precision, and 70.24% recall. These findings indicate that SVM is more robust for imbalanced classification tasks and can provide useful insights even when academic-performance labels are predicted from non-academic attributes.