2022 article
AN APPROACH TO POPULATION SYNTHESIS OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS FOR UNDERSTANDING DROPOUT RISK
2022 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE (WSC), pp. 677–688.
Dropping out of STEM remains a critical issue today, and it would be useful for universities to have reliable predictive models to detect students' dropout risks. Generating a synthetic population of the true population could be useful for simulating the system and testing scenarios. We outline an approach for creating a synthetic population of students in STEM and build a microsimulation which simulates students' risk behaviors over time. This process has identified several areas that must be addressed before the synthetic population represents the true population in a simulation.