Computational Social Indicators: A Case Study of Chinese University Ranking

Many professional organizations produce regular reports of social indicators to monitor social progress. Despite their reasonable results and societal value, early efforts on social indicator computing suffer from three problems: 1) labor-intensive data gathering, 2) insufficient data, and 3) expert-relied data fusion. Towards this end, we present a novel graph-based multi-channel ranking scheme for social indicator computation by exploring the rich multi-channel Web data. For each channel, this scheme presents the semi-structured and unstructured data with simple graphs and hypergraphs, respectively. It then groups the channels into different clusters according to their correlations. After that, it uses a unified model to learn the cluster-wise common spaces, perform ranking separately upon each space, and fuse these rankings to produce the final one. We take Chinese university ranking as a case study and validate our scheme over a real-world dataset. It is worth emphasizing that our scheme is applicable to computation of other social indicators, such as Educational attainment.