A new measure for the attitude to mobility of Italian students and graduates: a topological data analysis approach

Martina Vittorietti, Ornella Giambalvo, Vincenzo Giuseppe Genova, Fabio Aiello

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Students’ and graduates’ mobility is an interesting topic of discussion especially for the Italian education system and universities. The main reasons for migration and for the so called brain drain, can be found in the socio-economic context and in the famous North–South divide. Measuring mobility and understanding its dynamic over time and space are not trivial tasks. Most of the studies in the related literature focus on the determinants of such phenomenon, in this paper, instead, combining tools coming from graph theory and Topological Data Analysis we propose a new measure for the attitude to mobility. Each mobility trajectory is represented by a graph and the importance of the features constituting the graph are evaluated over time using persistence diagrams. The attitude to mobility of the students is then ranked computing the distance between the individual persistence diagram and the theoretical persistence diagram of the stayer student. The new approach is used for evaluating the mobility of the students that in 2008 enrolled in an Italian university. The relation between attitude to mobility and the main socio-demographic variables is investigated.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)509-543
Number of pages35
JournalStatistical Methods & Applications
Volume32
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A new measure for the attitude to mobility of Italian students and graduates: a topological data analysis approach'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this