<![CDATA[Prediction of students academic success is important to support decision-making in education. Educational datasets are generally dominated by categorical variables that require encoding before modeling, which may cause information loss and reduce accuracy. This study applies the CatBoost algorithm, which processes categorical variables natively without additional encoding, to predict students' Exam Score on the Student Performance Factors dataset from Kaggle, with LightGBM used as a comparison model. Evaluation was carried out under three data-split schemes (70:30, 80:20, 90:10) using k-fold cross-validation and three regression metrics (R², MAE, RMSE), followed by model interpretation using Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). The results show that CatBoost consistently outperforms LightGBM across all schemes, with the best performance obtained under the 90:10 scheme (CatBoost: R² = 0.851, MAE = 0.475, RMSE = 1.414; LightGBM: R² = 0.809, MAE = 0.758, RMSE = 1.599). SHAP analysis identifies Attendance, Hours_Studied, and Previous_Scores as the most influential features in the prediction. These findings confirm that combining CatBoost with SHAP produces an academic prediction model that is both accurate and transparen.]]>
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