• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.287-306
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• 2020

Purpose Youth unemployment is a social problem that continues to emerge in Korea. In this study, we create a model that predicts the employment of college graduates using decision tree, random forest and artificial neural network among machine learning techniques and compare the performance between each model through prediction results. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the data processing was performed, including the acquisition of the college graduates' vocational path survey data first, then the selection of independent variables and setting up dependent variables. We use R to create decision tree, random forest, and artificial neural network models and predicted whether college graduates were employed through each model. And at the end, the performance of each model was compared and evaluated. Findings The results showed that the random forest model had the highest performance, and the artificial neural network model had a narrow difference in performance than the decision tree model. In the decision-making tree model, key nodes were selected as to whether they receive economic support from their families, major affiliates, the route of obtaining information for jobs at universities, the importance of working income when choosing jobs and the location of graduation universities. Identifying the importance of variables in the random forest model, whether they receive economic support from their families as important variables, majors, the route to obtaining job information, the degree of irritating feelings for a month, and the location of the graduating university were selected.