The "Best Colleges for You" app is designed to help you explore many of the colleges in the United States of America. It’s intended for your entertainment. Just click "Get Schools" and you're on your way!
- The Shiny App is here: https://thompsonml.shinyapps.io/BestCollegeApp/
- The RStudio Cloud project is here: Posit Cloud
Here's an example of a personalized Top-10 list of colleges generated by the app:
The App leverages a probabilistic model (Bayesian belief network) relating colleges to their traits and meshing them with the user's student profile through knowledge-based weighting to quantify how well-suited each college is to the student profile. The key metrics identifying what distinguishes each college from all others are the Generalized Bayes Factors
(see Yuan et al. "Most Relevant Explanation in Bayesian Networks", JAIR, v42, 2011) calculated for the college traits, such as prevalence of academic disciplines, students' SAT distribution, ethnic distribution, financial outcomes, etc.
From origins as a Kaggle "Script of the Week: January 8, 2016" awardee, the App rapidly blossomed into a Shiny app. As such it has provided fun and insights to family and friends over the past 2 and a half years or so. Now, with revisions as recently as March, 2019, the "Best Colleges for You" app is open for all!