Predictive ML for Educational Decisions

College selection and analysis is an especially daunting process for engineering aspirants in India. With over 4000+ institutes to choose from, while keeping in mind a multitude of factors including average salaries post placement, location and campus size among others, students can have quite the challenge in determining the right colleges for themselves. With the increasing demand of machine learning and supervised techniques, all the various factors affecting college selection can be determined and analyzed with the accuracy and speed of a computer, making the process less lengthy and more effective. For our paper, we use different classification algorithms in order to classify over 350+ engineering colleges spanning across India based on common predictor variables. We also predict future cut-off scores for all the colleges using previous year data with the help of regression algorithms. This paper provides a number of valuable graphs and observations that can be helpful for researchers and practitioners in the field of supervised machine learning and ensemble methods.