A University Admission Prediction System using Stacked Ensemble Learning

For an aspiring graduate student, shortlisting the universities to apply to is a difficult problem. Since an application is extremely dynamic, students often tend to wonder if their profile matches the requirement of a certain university. Moreover, the cost of applying to a university is extremely high making it critical that students shortlist universities based on their profile. A university admission prediction system is quite useful for students to determine their chances of acceptance to a specific university. The system could make use of data related to previous applicants to various universities and their admit or reject status. Earlier models of such prediction systems suffer from several drawbacks such as not considering important parameters like GRE (Graduate Record Exam) scores or research experience. Further, the accuracy reported by earlier models is also not sufficiently high. In this paper, a stacked ensemble model that predicts the chances of admit of a student to a particular university has been proposed. The proposed model takes into consideration various factors related to the student including their research experience, industry experience etc. Further, the system proposed has been evaluated against various other machine learning algorithms including other deep learning methods. It is observed that the proposed model easily outperforms all other models and provides a very high accuracy.