charity_recommender

A Kaggle Data Science for Good challenge

Teachers spend more than a billion dollars of their own money on classroom materials.
DonorsChoose.org invites Data Scientists to pair donors with classroom requests that will motivate an additional gift.
Anonymized data on donations from the past five years is supplied.
The winning methods will be implemented in DonorsChoose.org email marketing campaigns.

NYC Charity Recommender Business Objective:

Donor chooses a classroom project they would like to donate to from a list of projects.
Pair donors to classroom requests that will most motivate them to make an additional gift.
charity_recommender uses collaborative filtering to recommend 10 new projects.

Data Acquisition:

3 million people and partners have funded 1.1 million DonorsChoose.org projects.
This dataset started out with 4.6 million donations generated by 2 million donors, going towards 901,300 individual projects from the USA between 2012 and 2018.
The graph below shows the top 10 states with the highest frequency of donations. Libraries: SurPRISE

Data Preparation

Address cold start for recommender systems

Localize USA dataset to New York City
Total Donation Amount Received over a 5 year period: $8,015,266.39
76,257 Donations Received
26,009 Donors
Earliest Date Donation Received: 2012-10-27
Most Recent Donation Received Date: 2018-05-09
The most common donor donated 2,152 times
Max Single Donation: $19,588.38
Min Single Donation: $0.21

Localize the dataset to NYC - Addressing the coldstart.

When using collaborative filter recommender system is that most people donating choose to donate to projects they think they know about or are local. By trimming it to a major local area like New York City, this collaborative recommender system focuses on donors in New York City and the donations a New Yorker might want to donate to. More effectively deliver recommendations to donors located in the same area.

Limit the X axis to $1,000 to show there is a distribution.
Data is positively skewed past $1,000,000.

Frequency:

Donation amount: The dataset contains donors that donated one time, and donors that have donated once per month over a multi-year span.
Individual donors donated $1 while others donated millions of dollars over time.
While scaling these values in each dimension would be possible, the data collected may likely have skewed the results towards those that are already being donated to frequently and with higher donation quantity.
Each donatation is represented as any amount and any number of times to a single project as a binary value.

Comparing Similarity Matrices on an Implicit Dataset

Apply the SurPRISE library to compare each donors contribution history.
Use the DonorID in the first column, ProjectID in the second column, and the implicit donation history in third column.
By matching the Donor ID's and Project ID's and the donation history, SurPRISE creates a similarity matrix full of binary values. With this matrix we can calculate their given donation history as a "distance" from another user's donation history.

Modeling

The intution behind using a collaborative filtering recommender system on an implicit dataset

http://datameetsmedia.com/an-overview-of-recommendation-systems/

When donor A and donor B have the exact same donation history, we can say that the distance between these two matrices is 0.
If B develops a preference for something new, A may also develop a preference for that new item as well.
When B likes something new we are using the similarity matrix comparison to guess that A will also like the new item.
Through a process called collaborative filtering, we can begin to project a possible pattern of donations in the future for donors that have not yet donated by comparing their history to another user's history.
With collaborative filtering recommender systems A's preference matrix may match many other user preference matrices and we will want to offer A an array of options, called recommendations.

By comparing the distance between donors donation history, we can assume from other similar the donor donation histories that they may want to donate to a charity that someone with a similar donation history has donated to. Using B's filled out donor history as a reference for possible projects subsequent donations may be on a list of recommendations. For example, if A and B both choose to eat pizza and ride a bike, then chances are if B likes sports drinks that A will also like sports drinks, so why not recommend A sports drinks as well?

Evaluation

In order to evaluate this project, it needs to be deployed.

Deploy

In the real world

Donor preferences do not always exactly, instead use their distances by measuring similarity. By applying the SurPRISE library we don't have to do all the Matrix Factorization mathematics that goes into generating the distances between donor preference matrices and instead return a list of projects they may choose to donate to.

In this project, five algorithms were used to test which recommendations would best suit the donor based on implicit donation history. These five algorithms use the Grid Search Cross Validation (GridSearchCV) to compare Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error between which yields the best error metrics and time to compute recommendations.

Using the three algorithms with best results are listed here:

Singular Value Decomposition for Implicit Feedback (SVD++)
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)
Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NNMF).

Used GridSearchCV on Matrix Factorization techniques to calculate "distance maetrics". It turns out SVD++ has the lowest Mean Absolute error rate. A boxplot visualization is below:

The matrix was sparse, did not use the CoClustering or Normal Predictor. The CoClustering Algorithm works best by comparing a more heavily populated matrix, the resulting recommendation error metrics didn't make sense. Because the implicit dataset is not normally distributed, the NormalPredictor achieved lower scores here.

Error metrics don't quite work when using recommender systems because error metrics are used for predictions. When you give someone a list of recommendations and they choose one of them, it does not necessarily mean they didn't like the other ones. They may like them all the same amount, they may not see the item or project they would have most wanted to donate to. The challenge in interpreting error metrics comes where the algorithms are predicting based on history to project into the future what a person may like, but without many more datapoints and feedback, a recommendation list will have to be tested in live trials.

According to the Error metrics SVD++ yielded the best scores for error metrics results and it is most geared towards the implicit feedback DataSet. The NNMF is a close second in my opinion. The Google Colab GUI returns a list of 10 projects that a user may like to choose from next. It will keep track of the new users preferences and compare the new user DataSet to the rest of the New York Donor DataSet, too.

My next steps

Use PySpark to aggregate all unique donation entries from all over the country.
Incorporating Meta Data from Donors and Projects to create a hybrid filter
Compare Content Filter Recommender System against a Collaborative Recommender System that has more meta data
Include a Time Series to see where donations are coming from, more expansive overview and EDA
Measuring Donor Enthusiasm for Projects on a logarithmic scale

Chris-Manna/charity_recommender