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59 fast ml-2014-04-21-Predicting happiness from demographics and poll answers


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Introduction: This time we attempt to predict if poll responders said they’re happy or not. We also take a look at what features are the most important for that prediction. There is a private competition at Kaggle for students of The Analytics Edge MOOC. You can get the invitation link by signing up for the course and going to the week seven front page. It’s an entry-level, educational contest - there’s no prizes and the data is small. The competition is based on data from the Show of Hands , a mobile polling application for US residents. The link between the app and the MOOC is MIT: it’s an MIT’s class and MIT’s alumnus’ app. You get a few thousand examples. Each consists of some demographics: year of birth gender income household status education level party preference Plus a number of answers to yes/no poll questions from the Show of Hands. Here’s a sample: Are you good at math? Have you cried in the past 60 days? Do you brush your teeth two or more times ever


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 This time we attempt to predict if poll responders said they’re happy or not. [sent-1, score-0.516]

2 There is a private competition at Kaggle for students of The Analytics Edge MOOC. [sent-3, score-0.071]

3 You can get the invitation link by signing up for the course and going to the week seven front page. [sent-4, score-0.184]

4 It’s an entry-level, educational contest - there’s no prizes and the data is small. [sent-5, score-0.205]

5 The competition is based on data from the Show of Hands , a mobile polling application for US residents. [sent-6, score-0.196]

6 The link between the app and the MOOC is MIT: it’s an MIT’s class and MIT’s alumnus’ app. [sent-7, score-0.175]

7 Each consists of some demographics: year of birth gender income household status education level party preference Plus a number of answers to yes/no poll questions from the Show of Hands. [sent-9, score-1.001]

8 Do you drink the unfiltered tap water in your home? [sent-14, score-0.062]

9 The goal is to predict how a person responded to “are you happy? [sent-17, score-0.241]

10 It should be interesting to see what factors have the most impact on the target variable. [sent-20, score-0.166]

11 The contest is evaluated using AUC and the top of the leaderboard scores about 0. [sent-21, score-0.071]

12 The data has a lot of missing values, because few responders answered all 101 questions. [sent-23, score-0.351]

13 There’s a variable with vote count for each person: Among demographics only YOB has missing values. [sent-24, score-0.339]

14 na(data$YOB)] = 0 It is convenient to use R, because R can handle categorical values natively, without vectorizing to one-hot encoding. [sent-27, score-0.071]

15 8 # proportion of training examples n = nrow( data ) train_len = round( n * p_train ) test_start = train_len + 1 i = sample. [sent-29, score-0.063]

16 Now to see which factors are important for predicting happiness. [sent-38, score-0.104]

17 var = 18, main = "Importance of variables" ) It seems that what matters is mostly demographics, with an exception of gender. [sent-41, score-0.142]

18 Apparently there’s a gap: the three questions matter much more than the others. [sent-44, score-0.096]

19 They are: 118237: Do you feel like you are “in over-your-head” in any aspect of your life right now? [sent-45, score-0.267]


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tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('yob', 0.596), ('demographics', 0.255), ('mit', 0.255), ('income', 0.17), ('person', 0.17), ('poll', 0.17), ('matters', 0.142), ('education', 0.142), ('responders', 0.142), ('happy', 0.142), ('feel', 0.125), ('link', 0.113), ('importance', 0.113), ('factors', 0.104), ('level', 0.104), ('questions', 0.096), ('missing', 0.084), ('contest', 0.071), ('prizes', 0.071), ('life', 0.071), ('home', 0.071), ('mooc', 0.071), ('bayes', 0.071), ('naive', 0.071), ('aspect', 0.071), ('private', 0.071), ('round', 0.071), ('answers', 0.071), ('front', 0.071), ('child', 0.071), ('inherently', 0.071), ('mac', 0.071), ('responded', 0.071), ('application', 0.071), ('vectorizing', 0.071), ('auc', 0.068), ('show', 0.064), ('data', 0.063), ('status', 0.062), ('year', 0.062), ('impact', 0.062), ('math', 0.062), ('gender', 0.062), ('said', 0.062), ('app', 0.062), ('mobile', 0.062), ('study', 0.062), ('unfiltered', 0.062), ('answered', 0.062), ('birth', 0.062)]

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