Perfect way to build a Predictive Model in less than 10 minutes

Overview

• Hackathons involve building predictive models in a short time span
• The Data Preprocessing step takes up the most share while building a model
• Other steps involve descriptive analysis, data modelling and evaluating the model’s performance

Introduction

In the last few months, we have started conducting data science hackathons. These hackathons are contests with a well defined data problem, which has be be solved in short time frame. They typically last any where between 2 – 7 days.

If month long competitions on Kaggle are like marathons, then these hackathons are shorter format of the game – 100 mts Sprint. They are high energy events where data scientists bring in lot of energy, the leaderboard changes almost every hour and speed to solve data science problem matters lot more than Kaggle competitions.

One of the best tip, I can provide to data scientists participating in these hackathons (or even in longer competitions) is to quickly build the first solution and submit. The first few submissions should be real quick. I have created modules on Python and R which can takes in tabular data and the name of target variable and BOOM! I have my first model in less than 10 minutes (Assuming your data has more than 100,000 observations). For smaller data sets, this can be even faster. The reason of submitting this super-fast solution is to create a benchmark for yourself on which you need to improve. I will talk about my methodology in this article.

Breaking Down the process of Predictive Modeling

To understand the strategic areas, let’s first break down the process of predictive analysis into its essential components. Broadly, it can be divided into 4 parts. Every component demands x amount of time to execute. Let’s evaluate these aspects n(with time taken):

1. Descriptive analysis on the Data – 50% time
2. Data treatment (Missing value and outlier fixing) – 40% time
3. Data Modelling – 4% time
4. Estimation of performance – 6% time

Note: The percentages are based on a sample of 40 competition, I have participated in past (rounded off).

Now we know where do we need to cut down time. Let’s go step by step into the process (with time estimate):

1.Descriptive Analysis : When I started my career into analytics, we used to primarily build models based on Logistic Regression and Decision Trees. Most of the algorithm we used involved greedy algorithms, which can subset the number of features I need to focus on.

With advanced machine learning tools coming in race, time taken to perform this task can be significantly reduced. For your initial analysis, you probably need not do any kind of feature engineering. Hence, the time you might need to do descriptive analysis is restricted to know missing values and big features which are directly visible. In my methodology, you will need 2 minutes to complete this step (I assume a data with 100,000 observations).

2.Data Treatment : Since, this is considered to be the most time consuming step, we need to find smart techniques to fill in this phase. Here are two simple tricks which you can implement :

• Create dummy flags for missing value(s): In  general, I have discovered that missing values in variable also sometimes carry a good amount of information. For instance, if you are analyzing the clickstream data, you probably won’t have a lot of values in specific variables corresponding to mobile usage.
• Impute missing value with mean/any other easiest method : I have found ‘mean’ works just fine for the first iteration. Just in cases where there is an obvious trend coming from Descriptive analysis,  you probably need a more intelligent method.

With such simple methods of data treatment, you can reduce the time to treat data to 3-4 minutes.

3. Data Modelling : I have found GBM to be extremely effective for 100,000 observation cases. In case of bigger data, you can consider running a Random Forest. This will take maximum amount of time (~4-5 minutes)

4. Estimation of Performance : I find k-fold with k=7 highly effective to take my initial bet. This finally takes 1-2 minutes to execute and document.

The reason to build this model is not to win the competition, but to establish a benchmark for our self. Let me take a deeper dive into my algorithm. I have also included a few snippets of my code in this article.

Let’s start putting this into action

I will not include my entire function to give you space to innovate. Here is a skeleton of my algorithm(in R):

Step 1 : Append both train and test data set together

Step 2 : Read data-set to your memory

setwd("C:\\Users\\Tavish\\Desktop\\Kagg\\AV")
complete <- read.csv("complete_data.csv", stringsAsFactors = TRUE)

Step 3: View the column names/summary of the dataset

colnames(complete )
[1] "ID" "Gender" "City"  "Monthly_Income" "Disbursed" "train"

Step 4: Identify the a) Numeric variable b) ID variables c) Factor Variables d) Target variables

Step 5 : Create flags for missing values

missing_val_var <- function(data,variable,new_var_name) {
data$new_var_name <- ifelse(is.na(variable),1,0))
return(data$new_var_name)}

Step 6 : Impute Numeric Missing values

numeric_impute <- function(data,variable) {
mean1 <- mean(data$variable)
data$variable <- ifelse(is.na(data$variable),mean1,data$variable)
return(new_var_name)
}

Similarly impute categorical variable so that all missing value is coded as a single value say “Null”

Step 7 : Pass the imputed variable into the modelling process

#Challenge: Try to Integrate a K-fold methodology in this step

create_model <- function(trainData,target) {
set.seed(120)
myglm <- glm(target ~ . , data=trainData, family = "binomial")
return(myglm) }

Step 8 : Make predictions

score <- predict(myglm, newdata = testData, type = "response")
score_train <- predict(myglm, newdata = complete, type = "response")

Step 9 : Check performance

auc(complete$Disbursed,score_train)

And Submit!

End Notes

Hopefully, this article would have given enough motivation to make your own 10-min scoring code. Most of the masters on Kaggle and the best scientists on our hackathons have these codes ready and fire their first submission before making a detailed analysis. Once they have some estimate of benchmark, they start improvising further. Share your complete codes in the comment box below.

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Tavish Srivastava

Tavish Srivastava, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Analytics Vidhya, is an IIT Madras graduate and a passionate data-science professional with 8+ years of diverse experience in markets including the US, India and Singapore, domains including Digital Acquisitions, Customer Servicing and Customer Management, and industry including Retail Banking, Credit Cards and Insurance. He is fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence inspired by human intelligence and enjoys every discussion, theory or even movie related to this idea.