Long-term prediction of master student influx in programs Artificial Intelligence and Applied Data Science
Summary
The aim of this paper is to predict the long-term influx of new master students in the
Artificial Intelligence program at Utrecht University. A VARMA model was trained on
81.25% of the data, the remaining 18.75% of the data was used as test set. The VARMA
model required at least two time series data sets which influence each other. The first
was the past influx numbers of students to the Artificial Intelligence program. The
second was the number of bachelor diplomas for Artificial Intelligence. The predictions
show that the number of new students will rise from 119 in 2022 to 194 in 2031. These
results were predicted with a MAPE value of 6.75, which means the model is a good
fit. Furthermore the results show a linear trend in the increase of new master students.