Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree

Supervised Learning

Project: Finding Donors for CharityML

Project Goals

In this project, I employ several supervised algorithms to accurately model individuals' income using data collected from the 1994 U.S. Census. I then choose the best candidate algorithm from preliminary results and further optimize this algorithm to best model the data. My goal with this implementation is to construct a model that accurately predicts whether an individual makes more than $50,000. This sort of task can arise in a non-profit setting, where organizations survive on donations. Understanding an individual's income can help a non-profit better understand how large of a donation to request, or whether or not they should reach out to begin with. While it can be difficult to determine an individual's general income bracket directly from public sources, we can (as we will see) infer this value from other publically available features.

The dataset for this project originates from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The datset was donated by Ron Kohavi and Barry Becker, after being published in the article "Scaling Up the Accuracy of Naive-Bayes Classifiers: A Decision-Tree Hybrid". You can find the article by Ron Kohavi online.

Project Highlights

This project is designed to get you acquainted with the many supervised learning algorithms available in sklearn, and to also provide for a method of evaluating just how each model works and performs on a certain type of data. It is important in machine learning to understand exactly when and where a certain algorithm should be used, and when one should be avoided.

Things you will learn by completing this project:

How to identify when preprocessing is needed, and how to apply it.
How to establish a benchmark for a solution to the problem.
What each of several supervised learning algorithms accomplishes given a specific dataset.
How to investigate whether a candidate solution model is adequate for the problem.

Install

This project requires Python 3.x and the following Python libraries installed:

You will also need to have software installed to run and execute an iPython Notebook

We recommend students install Anaconda, a pre-packaged Python distribution that contains all of the necessary libraries and software for this project.

Code

Template code is provided in the finding_donors.ipynb notebook file. You will also be required to use the included visuals.py Python file and the census.csv dataset file to complete your work. While some code has already been implemented to get you started, you will need to implement additional functionality when requested to successfully complete the project. Note that the code included in visuals.py is meant to be used out-of-the-box and not intended for students to manipulate. If you are interested in how the visualizations are created in the notebook, please feel free to explore this Python file.

Run

In a terminal or command window, navigate to the top-level project directory finding_donors/ (that contains this README) and run one of the following commands:

ipython notebook finding_donors.ipynb

jupyter notebook finding_donors.ipynb

This will open the iPython Notebook software and project file in your browser.

Data

The modified census dataset consists of approximately 32,000 data points, with each datapoint having 13 features. This dataset is a modified version of the dataset published in the paper "Scaling Up the Accuracy of Naive-Bayes Classifiers: a Decision-Tree Hybrid", by Ron Kohavi. You may find this paper online, with the original dataset hosted on UCI.

Features

age: Age
workclass: Working Class (Private, Self-emp-not-inc, Self-emp-inc, Federal-gov, Local-gov, State-gov, Without-pay, Never-worked)
education_level: Level of Education (Bachelors, Some-college, 11th, HS-grad, Prof-school, Assoc-acdm, Assoc-voc, 9th, 7th-8th, 12th, Masters, 1st-4th, 10th, Doctorate, 5th-6th, Preschool)
education-num: Number of educational years completed
marital-status: Marital status (Married-civ-spouse, Divorced, Never-married, Separated, Widowed, Married-spouse-absent, Married-AF-spouse)
occupation: Work Occupation (Tech-support, Craft-repair, Other-service, Sales, Exec-managerial, Prof-specialty, Handlers-cleaners, Machine-op-inspct, Adm-clerical, Farming-fishing, Transport-moving, Priv-house-serv, Protective-serv, Armed-Forces)
relationship: Relationship Status (Wife, Own-child, Husband, Not-in-family, Other-relative, Unmarried)
race: Race (White, Asian-Pac-Islander, Amer-Indian-Eskimo, Other, Black)
sex: Sex (Female, Male)
capital-gain: Monetary Capital Gains
capital-loss: Monetary Capital Losses
hours-per-week: Average Hours Per Week Worked
native-country: Native Country (United-States, Cambodia, England, Puerto-Rico, Canada, Germany, Outlying-US(Guam-USVI-etc), India, Japan, Greece, South, China, Cuba, Iran, Honduras, Philippines, Italy, Poland, Jamaica, Vietnam, Mexico, Portugal, Ireland, France, Dominican-Republic, Laos, Ecuador, Taiwan, Haiti, Columbia, Hungary, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Scotland, Thailand, Yugoslavia, El-Salvador, Trinadad&Tobago, Peru, Hong, Holand-Netherlands)

Target Variable

income: Income Class (<=50K, >50K)

jscriptcoder/Finding-Donors-for-CharityML