A Comparative Profiling of the EU-27: Education Versus Environmental Performance, Using DBSCAN Algorithm

Highlighting linkages between education and the environment could be defined as a constant interest throughout the last decades, for various categories of stakeholders, starting from the experts and related literature, and going to the administrative and governmental institutions. Therefore, although highly researched, there are new perspectives that could be brought to the table, especially in terms of regional mapping and performance interconnections. Considering this, in the current paper, the main research objective would be to construct a profiling framework, that could be applied in parallel for both the education and environmental dimensions, followed by a detailed juxtaposition of the two. Through this endeavor, we aim to generate new knowledge about the EU-27’s recent performance, drawing attention to both the similarities and divergences of the educational and sustainability dimensions. This framework will be validated by a strong computational approach, DBSCAN clustering, an algorithm that has the ability to detect noise points, so regional distinctive poles that do not adhere to the general performance. Thus, the current paper aims to contribute to the state of the related literature and add an extensive comparison between two key areas of socio-economic development at an international scale, having as a basis 2022 indicators.