Despite of providing high quality of education, demand on predicting student academic performance become more critical to improve the quality and assisting students to achieve a great performance in their studies. The lack of existing an efficiency and accurate prediction model is one of the major issues. Predictive analytics can provide institution with intuitive and better decision making. The objective of this paper is to review current research activities related to academic analytics focusing on predicting student academic performance. Various methods have been proposed by previous researchers to develop the best performance model using variety of students data, techniques, algorithms and tools. Predictive modeling used in predicting student performance are related to several learning tasks such as classification, regression and clustering. To achieve best prediction model, a lot of variables have been chosen and tested to find most influential attributes to perform prediction. Accurate performance prediction will be helpful in order to provide guidance in learning process that will benefit to students in avoiding poor scores. The predictive model furthermore can help instructor to forecast course completion including student final grade which are directly correlated to student performance success. To harvest an effective predictive model, it requires a good input data and variables, suitable predictive method as well as powerful and robust prediction model.

Predictive analytics including statistical techniques, predictive modelling, machine learning, and data mining that analyse current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. Higher education institutions nowadays are under increasing pressure to respond to national and global economic, political and social changes such as the growing need to increase the proportion of students in certain disciplines, embedding workplace graduate attributes and ensuring that the quality of learning programs are both nationally and globally relevant. However, in higher education institution, there are significant numbers of students that stop their studies before graduation, especially for undergraduate students. Problem related to stopping out student and late or not graduating student can be improved by applying analytics. Using analytics, administrators, instructors and student can predict what will happen in future. Administrator and instructors can decide suitable intervention programs for at-risk students and before students decide to leave their study. Many different machine learning techniques have been implemented for predictive modelling in the past including decision tree, k-nearest neighbour, random forest, neural network, support vector machine, naïve Bayesian and a few others. A few attempts have been made to use Bayesian network and dynamic Bayesian network as modelling techniques for predicting at- risk student but a few challenges need to be resolved. The motivation for using dynamic Bayesian network is that it is robust to incomplete data and it provides opportunities for handling changing and dynamic environment. The trends and directions of research on prediction and identifying at-risk student are developing prediction model that can provide as early as possible alert to administrators, predictive model that handle dynamic and changing environment and the model that provide real-time prediction.