Template Credit: Adapted from a template made available by Dr. Jason Brownlee of Machine Learning Mastery.
SUMMARY: The purpose of this project is to construct a prediction model using various machine learning algorithms and to document the end-to-end steps using a template. The Census Income dataset is a classic binary classification situation where we are trying to predict one of the two possible outcomes.
INTRODUCTION: This data was extracted from the 1994 Census Bureau database by Ronny Kohavi and Barry Becker (Data Mining and Visualization, Silicon Graphics). A set of reasonably clean records was extracted using the following conditions: ((AAGE>16) && (AGI>100) && (AFNLWGT>1) && (HRSWK>0)). The prediction task is to determine whether a person makes over 50K a year.
This dataset has many cells with missing values, so we will examine the models by deleting the rows with missing cells. This iteration of the project will produce a set of baseline results that we can use to compare with other data cleaning methods.
CONCLUSION: The baseline performance of the ten algorithms achieved an average accuracy of 81.37%. Four ensemble algorithms (Bagged CART, Random Forest, AdaBoost, and Stochastic Gradient Boosting) achieved the top accuracy scores after the first round of modeling. After a series of tuning trials, Stochastic Gradient Boosting turned in the top result using the training data. It achieved an average accuracy of 86.99%. Using the optimized tuning parameter available, the Stochastic Gradient Boosting algorithm further processed the validation dataset with an accuracy of 87.23%, which was slightly better than the accuracy of the training data.
For this project, the Stochastic Gradient Boosting ensemble algorithm yielded consistently top-notch training and validation results, which warrant the additional processing required by the algorithm.
Dataset Used: Census Income Data Set
Dataset ML Model: Binary classification with numerical and categorical attributes
Dataset Reference: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Census+Income
One potential source of performance benchmark: https://www.kaggle.com/uciml/adult-census-income
The HTML formatted report can be found here on GitHub.