Overseas Graduate University Recommender System

Sunday. September 15, 2019 - 2 mins

Context

This is a Data Mining project based on a forum called Gradcafe.

Prospective graduate students have long been wondering what factors are taken into consideration by the admission office and whether their academic achievements are sufficient for a particular program. Using a dataset with over 30,000 entries from TheGradCafe.com, this project aimed to provide insight on the admission requirements of each school and major, generate a recommendation list using Collaborative Filtering, and predict the admission rates for each school to assist students in their decision-making process.

A shallow dive into our dataset

Input

University Name
Major - Basically program name or major name in detail
Season- Fall or Spring
Decision - Accepted, Rejected, Wait listed, Interview, or Other.
Decision Method - Email, Website, Post, Phone or Other.
Decision Date
Undergraduate GPA
GRE Verbal
GRE Quant
GRE Writing
Status - American, International, International with US degree or Other
Post date
Post Timestamp
Comments

Data augmentation

Match every university with its world ranking
Classify majors into 10 fields

Data Visualization

This gives us an overall picture of the distribution of the majors and the different admission rates of different majors.

This gives us an overall picture of the ditribution of the university of our dataset.

This gives us an overall picture of different GRE and GPA preferrence of each major.

Information Retrieval from comments

We want to know whether the comments contain useful information for applicants to make desicions.

Our goal is to genererate a word token list according to TF-IDF to display the keywords of every university. We are delighted to gain some valuable insights based on text analytics.Let’s see what we got.

Both CMU and UCLA mention sponsorship，and some of the applicants feel excited about the results of assitantships. Applicants of UCB talks about their working experience in the field of industry. What’s more, applicants of UCB lay emphasis on academic expreience such as experiments and papers.