Lab 02: Credit Ratings

Scenario: Suppose you work for a small local bank, perhaps a credit union, that has a credit card product offering. For years, you relied on credit agencies to provide a rating of your customers’ credit, however, this costs your bank money. One day, you realize that it might be possible to reverse engineer your customers’ (and thus potential customers) credit rating based on the credit ratings that you have already purchased, as well as the income and demographic information that you already have, such as age, education level, etc.

Goal

The goal of this lab is to create a regression model that predicts the credit rating for an individual based on income and demographic information.

Data

This lab will use data from the textbook An Introduction to Statistical Learning.1

Response

  • Rating

Features

  • Income
  • Age
  • Education
  • Gender
  • Student
  • Married
  • Ethnicity

Data in Python

To load the data in Python, use:

import pandas as pd
credit_train = pd.read_csv("https://cs307.org/lab-02/data/credit-train.csv")

To create the X and y variants of the training data, use:

# create X and y for train
X_train = credit_train.drop("Rating", axis=1)
y_train = credit_train["Rating"]

Sample Statistics

Before modeling, be sure to look at the data. Calculate the summary statistics requested on PrairieLearn and create a visualization for your report.

Models

For this lab you will select one model to submit to the autograder. You may use any modeling techniques you’d like. The only rules are:

  • Models must start from the given training data, unmodified.
    • Importantly, the types and shapes of X_train and y_train should not be changed.
    • In the autograder, we will call mod.predict(X_test) on your model, where your model is loaded as mod and X_test has a compatible shape with and the same variable names and types as X_train.
    • We assume that you will use a Pipeline and GridSearchCV from sklearn as you will need to deal with heterogeneous data, and you should be using cross-validation.
      • So more specifically, you should create a Pipeline that is fit with GridSearchCV. Done correctly, this will store a “model” that you can submit to the autograder.
  • Your model must have a fit method.
  • Your model must have a predict method.
  • Your model should be created with scikit-learn version 1.4.0 or newer.
  • Your model should be serialized with joblib version 1.3.2 or newer.
    • Your serialized model must be less than 5MB.

While you can use any modeling technique, each lab is designed such that a model using only techniques seen so far in the course can pass the check in the autograder.

To obtain the maximum points via the autograder, your model performance must meet or exceed:

Test RMSE: 112.5

Model Persistence

To save your model for submission to the autograder, use the dump function from the joblib library. Check PrairieLearn for the filename that the autograder expects.

Discussion

As always, be sure to state a conclusion, that is, whether or not you would use the model you trained and selected for the real world scenario described at the start of the lab! If you are asked to train multiple models, first make clear which model you selected and are considering for use in practice. Discuss any limitations or potential improvements.

Additional discussion topics:

  • Ignoring model performance, does it seem appropriate to use these features for the stated goal of these models?
    • Is it legal to do so? Is it ethical to do so?
    • A very important lesson to learn now that you will have the power of machine learning: Just because you can, does not mean you should.

When answering discussion prompts: Do not simply answer the prompt! Answer the prompt, but write as if the prompt did not exist. Write your report as if the person reading it did not have access to this document!

Template Notebook

Submission

Before submission, especially of your report, you should be sure to review the Lab Policy page!

On Canvas, be sure to submit both your source .ipynb file and a rendered .html version of the report.

Footnotes

  1. The data can be found in the ISLP package, but we do not recommend installing the package because it requires old versions of software that we need to be up-to-date.↩︎