In 2000, Enron was one of the largest companies in the United States. By 2002, it had collapsed into bankruptcy due to widespread corporate fraud. In the resulting Federal investigation, a significant amount of typically confidential information entered into the public record, including tens of thousands of emails and detailed financial data for top executives. This project identifies systemic fraud at Enron by building a person of interest identifier based on financial and email data made public as a result of the Enron scandal.
An analysis of identifying potential persons of interest in the Enron fraud case can be found in the report/identifyFraudFromEnronEmail_Analysis.pdf
This project requires Python 2.7 and the following Python libraries installed:
The code is provided in the notebook identifyFraudFromEnronEmail.ipynb.
To open it, go to the top-level project directory identifyFraudFromEnronEmail/ and start the notebook server:
jupyter notebook
This should open a web browser to the server's dashboard (typically http://127.0.0.1:8888). Click on the appropriate notebook (.ipynb) to open it, and follow the instructions.
To run a code cell in the notebook, hit Shift+Enter. Any output will be displayed below the corresponding cell.
You can also add/edit markdown text cells and render them using Shift+Enter.
The dataset used in this project is store in a Python dictionary created by combining the Enron email and financial data, where each key-value pair in the dictionary corresponds to one person. The dictionary key is the person's name, and the value is another dictionary, which contains the names of all the features and their values for that person. The features in the data fall into three major types, namely financial features, email features and POI labels.
financial features: ['salary', 'deferral_payments', 'total_payments', 'loan_advances', 'bonus', 'restricted_stock_deferred', 'deferred_income', 'total_stock_value', 'expenses', 'exercised_stock_options', 'other', 'long_term_incentive', 'restricted_stock', 'director_fees']
- All units are in US dollars.
email features: ['to_messages', 'email_address', 'from_poi_to_this_person', 'from_messages', 'from_this_person_to_poi', 'shared_receipt_with_poi']
- Units are generally number of emails messages; notable exception is ‘email_address’, which is a text string
POI label: [‘poi’]
- Boolean, represented as integer