Discovery of Interconnection Among Knowledge Areas of Standard Computer Science Curricula by a Data Science Approach

Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) is a widely-used standard curricula of computer science, which has been developed jointly by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. CS2013 consists of 18 Knowledge Areas (KAs) such as Programming Languages and Software Engineering. Though it is obvious that there are strong interconnections among the KAs, it was hard to investigate the interconnections objectively and quantitatively. In this paper, the interconnections among the KAs of CS2013 are investigated by a data science approach. For this purpose, a collection of actual syllabi from the world’s top-ranked universities was constructed. Then, every actual syllabus is projected to the KA space by a probabilistic model-based method named simplified, supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (denoted by ssLDA). Consequently, the following interesting properties of the interconnections among the KAs were discovered: (1) There are the high interconnections among the KAs in each syllabi; (2) A plausible hierarchical structure of the KAs is found by utilizing the interconnections; (3) The structure shows that the KAs are classified into the three principal independent factors (HUMAN, THEORY, and IMPLEMENTATION). The factor of IMPLEMENTATION can be divided into PROGRAMMING and SYSTEM. The factor of SYSTEM can be divided further into DEVICES and NETWORK.