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A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach to IT Salary Prediction: Insights from Academic, Demographic, and Socio-Economic Factors

2025· article· W7127433422 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicInformation Systems Education and Curriculum Development
Canadian institutionsDouglas College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGraduation (instrument)Random forestSalaryFeature (linguistics)Compensation (psychology)Artificial neural networkSet (abstract data type)Data setKey (lock)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

IT professional’s first job after graduation is a significant milestone, marking the first step to financial independence. To explore the factors influencing compensation for IT graduates, a binary classification model using an ensemble machine learning approach that integrates Random Forest (RF), Neural Networks (NN), and LightGBM was developed. A multilevel strategy was adopted, beginning with training the data using RF and subsequently feeding the output leaf indices and the feature set into NN, culminating with LightGBM functioning as a meta-classifier. A cross-validation approach was employed to assess the model’s accuracy rigorously. The model achieved an 88% accuracy rate and an F1 score exceeding 80% across all categories. Utilizing SHAP analysis, key features per model were extracted and analyzed. Notable features highlighted by the two models are the mother’s educational level, IT experience, degree concentration, study frequency, accommodation, siblings and grades. Features such as holding a degree in cybersecurity and residing on dorms emerged as significant predictors of higher starting salaries. The model offers valuable insights for students, enabling them to enhance their qualifications and improve their compensation prospects after graduation

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.534
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it