Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
10.1145/3551708.3556207acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicemtConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Analysis and Prediction of QS World University Rankings based on Data Mining Technology

Published: 18 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

University rankings are increasingly important as a means of evaluating the quality of higher education institutions. They are significant not only in the recruitment of students but also in the allocation of government funds for higher education. The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranking system is currently one of the most well-known world university rankings. We provide insights into the QS world university rankings 2022, which is based on six simple indicators to represent university performance. This study consists of two parts. In the first part, the geographical coverage of the ranking list is analyzed. Then, the histogram and kernel density estimation are utilized to detect the distribution of each indicator. Next, a heat map based on Pearson Correlation Coefficient is plotted to display the correlations between indicators. In the second part, three regression models, namely linear regression, random forest regression, and XGBoost, are used to identify which technique is more appropriate to predict the performance of a university. In order to access their accuracy, the MAE (Mean Absolute Error), MSE (Mean Squared Error), and RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) of the three models are compared. The results of the experiments demonstrate that XGBoost has the best performance in predicting university rankings. This research provides a better understanding of the QS ranking system.

References

[1]
Deem R, Mok K H, and Lucas L. 2008. Transforming higher education in whose image? Exploring the concept of the ‘world-class’ university in Europe and Asia. Higher education policy, Vol. 21. No. 1, 83-97. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300179.
[2]
Dill D D, and Soo M. 2005. Academic quality, league tables, and public policy: A cross-national analysis of university ranking systems. Higher education, Vol. 49. No. 4, 495-533. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-1746-8.
[3]
Universities Q T. 2011. QS world university rankings. University Rankings. Business & Management Studies. Disponível em:. Acesso em, Vol. 4, 1-29.
[4]
Aguillo I, Bar-Ilan J, Levene M, 2010. Comparing university rankings. Scientometrics, Vol. 85. No. 1, 243-256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0190-z.
[5]
Liu L, and Liu Z. 2016. The variation of universally acknowledged world-class universities (UAWCUs) between 2010 and 2015: An empirical study by the ranks of THEs, QS and ARWU. Higher Education Studies, Vol. 6. No. 4, 54-69. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/hes.v6n4p54
[6]
Frey B S, and Rost K. 2010. Do rankings reflect research quality? Journal of Applied Economics, Vol. 13. No. 1, 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1514-0326(10)60002-5.
[7]
Dachyar M, and Dewi F. 2015. Improving university ranking to achieve university competitiveness by management information system. IOP conference series: Materials science and engineering, 012023.
[8]
Pavel A-P. 2015. Global university rankings - A comparative analysis. Procedia Economics and Finance, Vol. 26. No. 2015, 54-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2212-5671(15)00838-2.
[9]
Soh K. 2017. The seven deadly sins of world university ranking: A summary from several papers. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, Vol. 39. No. 1, 104-115. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2016.1254431.
[10]
Moed H F. 2017. A critical comparative analysis of five world university rankings. Scientometrics, Vol. 110. No. 2, 967-990. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2212-y.
[11]
Vernon M M, Balas E A, and Momani S. 2018. Are university rankings useful to improve research? A systematic review. PloS one, Vol. 13. No. 3, e0193762. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193762.
[12]
N.K S, Mathew K S, and Cherukodan S. 2018. Impact of scholarly output on university ranking. Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. 67. No. 3, 154-165. http://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-11-2017-0087.
[13]
Selten F, Neylon C, Huang C-K, 2020. A longitudinal analysis of university rankings. Quantitative Science Studies, Vol. 1. No. 3, 1109-1135. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00052.
[14]
Loyola-González O, Medina-Pérez M A, Valdez R A C, 2020. A contrast pattern-based scientometric study of the qs world university ranking. IEEE Access, Vol. 8. No., 206088-206104. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9257464/.
[15]
Safón V, and Docampo D. 2020. Analyzing the impact of reputational bias on global university rankings based on objective research performance data: the case of the Shanghai Ranking (ARWU). Scientometrics, Vol. 125. No. 3, 2199-2227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03722-z.
[16]
Lin W-C, and Chen C. 2021. Novel world university rankings combining academic, environmental and resource indicators. Sustainability, Vol. 13. No. 24, 13873. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413873.
[17]
Chen W, Zhu Z, and Jia T. 2021. The rank boost by inconsistency in university rankings: Evidence from 14 rankings of Chinese universities. Quantitative Science Studies, Vol. 2. No. 1, 335-349. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00101.
[18]
Theil H, and Chung C F. 1988. Information-theoretic measures of fit for univariate and multivariate linear regressions. The American Statistician, Vol. 42. No. 4, 249-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.1988.10475578.
[19]
Grömping U. 2009. Variable importance assessment in regression: linear regression versus random forest. The American Statistician, Vol. 63. No. 4, 308-319. https://doi.org/10.1198/tast.2009.08199.
[20]
Chen T, and Guestrin C. 2016. XGBoost: A scalable tree boosting system. Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 785-794. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939785

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Ranking resilience: assessing the impact of scientific performance and the expansion of the Times Higher Education Word University Rankings on the position of Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak universitiesScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04920-1129:3(1739-1770)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Data-Driven Heart Disease Risk Prediction with Machine Learning on Healthcare Datasets2023 Research, Invention, and Innovation Congress: Innovative Electricals and Electronics (RI2C)10.1109/RI2C60382.2023.10355977(220-223)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Enhancing research collaboration within a large university departmentInnovations in Education and Teaching International10.1080/14703297.2023.220906461:4(622-635)Online publication date: 4-May-2023

Index Terms

  1. Analysis and Prediction of QS World University Rankings based on Data Mining Technology

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICEMT '22: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Education and Multimedia Technology
    July 2022
    482 pages
    ISBN:9781450396455
    DOI:10.1145/3551708
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 November 2022

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Data analysis
    2. Forecasting techniques
    3. QS world university rankings

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • General Scientific Research Projects of Zhejiang Education Department
    • the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China
    • Ningbo Natural Science Foundation of China
    • Ningbo Science and Technology Special Projects of China
    • Zhejiang Province First-class Course Construction Project
    • School-level Teaching and Research Project

    Conference

    ICEMT 2022

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)45
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
    Reflects downloads up to 16 Nov 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Ranking resilience: assessing the impact of scientific performance and the expansion of the Times Higher Education Word University Rankings on the position of Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak universitiesScientometrics10.1007/s11192-023-04920-1129:3(1739-1770)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
    • (2023)Data-Driven Heart Disease Risk Prediction with Machine Learning on Healthcare Datasets2023 Research, Invention, and Innovation Congress: Innovative Electricals and Electronics (RI2C)10.1109/RI2C60382.2023.10355977(220-223)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Enhancing research collaboration within a large university departmentInnovations in Education and Teaching International10.1080/14703297.2023.220906461:4(622-635)Online publication date: 4-May-2023

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media