Time Series Analysis of Online Public Opinions in Colleges and Universities and its Sustainability

Abstract

With the quick penetration of Internet applications, online media have become an important carrier of public opinions. The opinions and comments expressed by young college students—one of the most active netizen groups—on the Internet have turned out to be an essential part of the online public opinions in colleges and universities. However, the existing systems generally employ simple statistical methods to analyze the effect of online public opinions on the image and reputation development of colleges and universities without taking account of other factors, such as the hotness characteristics of online public opinions and semantic information. Therefore, on the basis of Public Opinion Hotness Index and time series-based trend analysis, as well as the topics extracted using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model, this study aims to improve the analysis performance on the online public opinions in colleges and universities using short-term trend prediction results. The experience and lessons learned from a real case may provide strong data support and feasible suggestions for colleges and universities in analyzing and guiding the online public opinions.