Exercises from STA 380, a course on predictive modeling in the MS program in Business Analytics at UT-Austin Summer 2019
Instructor: Dr. James Scott
Summer 2019
1. Data exploration and visualization in R - Bar plots; basic plots for numerical data (scatterplots, boxplots, histograms, line graphs); panel plots
2. Resampling methods - The bootstrap; joint distributions; using the bootstrap to approximate value at risk (VaR)
3. Clustering - Basics of clustering; K-means clustering; hierarchical clustering
4. Latent features and structure - Principal component analysis (PCA)
5. Networks and association rules - Networks and association rule mining
6. Text data - Co-occurrence statistics; naive Bayes; TF-IDF; topic models; vector-space models of text
Over the past decade, both investors and the general public have paid increasingly close attention to the benefits of environmentally conscious buildings. There are both ethical and economic forces at work here. In commercial real estate, issues of eco-friendliness are intimately tied up with ordinary decisions about how to allocate capital. In this context, the decision to invest in eco-friendly buildings could pay off in at least four ways.
Of course, much of this is mere conjecture. At the end of the day, tenants may or may not be willing to pay a premium for rental space in green buildings. We can only find out by carefully examining data on the commercial real-estate market.
The file greenbuildings.csv contains data on 7,894 commercial rental properties from across the United States. Of these, 685 properties have been awarded either LEED or EnergyStar certification as a green building. You can easily find out more about these rating systems on the web, e.g. at www.usgbc.org. The basic idea is that a commercial property can receive a green certification if its energy efficiency, carbon footprint, site selection, and building materials meet certain environmental benchmarks, as certified by outside engineers.
A group of real estate economists constructed the data in the following way. Of the 1,360 green-certified buildings listed as of December 2007 on the LEED or EnergyStar websites, current information about building characteristics and monthly rents were available for 685 of them. In order to provide a control population, each of these 685 buildings was matched to a cluster of nearby commercial buildings in the CoStar database. Each small cluster contains one green-certified building, and all non-rated buildings within a quarter-mile radius of the certified building. On average, each of the 685 clusters contains roughly 12 buildings, for a total of 7,894 data points.
The columns of the data set are coded as follows:
An Austin real-estate developer is interested in the possible economic impact of “going green” in her latest project: a new 15-story mixed-use building on East Cesar Chavez, just across I-35 from downtown. Will investing in a green building be worth it, from an economic perspective? The baseline construction costs are $100 million, with a 5% expected premium for green certification.
The developer has had someone on her staff, who’s been described to her as a “total Excel guru from his undergrad statistics course,” run some numbers on this data set and make a preliminary recommendation. Here’s how this person described his process.
I began by cleaning the data a little bit. In particular, I noticed that a handful of the buildings in the data set had very low occupancy rates (less than 10\% of available space occupied). I decided to remove these buildings from consideration, on the theory that these buildings might have something weird going on with them, and could potentially distort the analysis. Once I scrubbed these low-occupancy buildings from the data set, I looked at the green buildings and non-green buildings separately. The median market rent in the non-green buildings was $25 per square foot per year, while the median market rent in the green buildings was $27.60 per square foot per year: about $2.60 more per square foot. (I used the median rather than the mean, because there were still some outliers in the data, and the median is a lot more robust to outliers.) Because our building would be 250,000 square feet, this would translate into an additional $250000 x 2.6 = $650000 of extra revenue per year if we build the green building.
Our expected baseline construction costs are $100 million, with a 5% expected premium for green certification. Thus we should expect to spend an extra $5 million on the green building. Based on the extra revenue we would make, we would recuperate these costs in $5000000/650000 = 7.7 years. Even if our occupancy rate were only 90%, we would still recuperate the costs in a little over 8 years. Thus from year 9 onwards, we would be making an extra $650,000 per year in profit. Since the building will be earning rents for 30 years or more, it seems like a good financial move to build the green building.
The developer listened to this recommendation, understood the analysis, and still felt unconvinced. She has therefore asked you to revisit the report, so that she can get a second opinion.
Do you agree with the conclusions of her on-staff stats guru? If so, point to evidence supporting his case. If not, explain specifically where and why the analysis goes wrong, and how it can be improved. (For example, do you see the possibility of confounding variables for the relationship between rent and green status?) Tell your story mainly in pictures, with appropriate introductory and supporting text.
Note: this is intended mainly as an exercise in visual and numerical story-telling. While you can run a regression model if you want, that’s not the end goal here. Telling a story is. Keep it concise.
Consider the data in ABIA.csv, which contains information on every commercial flight in 2008 that either departed from or landed at Austin-Bergstrom Interational Airport. The variable codebook is as follows:
Your task is to create a figure, or set of related figures, that tell an interesting story about flights into and out of Austin. You can annotate the figure and briefly describe it, but strive to make it as stand-alone as possible. It shouldn’t need many, many paragraphs to convey its meaning. Rather, the figure should speak for itself as far as possible.
You have broad freedom to look at any variables you’d like here — try to find that sweet spot where you’re showing genuinely interesting relationships among more than just two variables, but where the resulting figure or set of figures doesn’t become overwhelming/confusing. (Faceting/panel plots might be especially useful here.) If you want to try your hand at mapping, you can find coordinates for the airport codes here: https://github.com/datasets/airport-codes. Combine this with a mapping package like ggmap, and you should have lots of possibilities!
In this problem, you will construct three different portfolios of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, and use bootstrap resampling to analyze the short-term tail risk of your portfolios. If you’re unfamiliar with exchange-traded funds, you can read a bit about them here.
Suppose you have $100,000 in capital. Your task is to:
quantmod package, as we used in class. Note: make sure to choose ETFs for which at least five years of data are available. There are tons of ETFs and some are quite new! You should assume that your portfolios are rebalanced each day at zero transaction cost. For example, if you’re allocating your wealth evenly among 5 ETFs, you always redistribute your wealth at the end of each day so that the equal five-way split is retained, regardless of that day’s appreciation/depreciation.
Notes:
Consider the data in social_marketing.csv. This was data collected in the course of a market-research study using followers of the Twitter account of a large consumer brand that shall remain nameless—-let’s call it “NutrientH20” just to have a label. The goal here was for NutrientH20 to understand its social-media audience a little bit better, so that it could hone its messaging a little more sharply.
A bit of background on the data collection: the advertising firm who runs NutrientH20’s online-advertising campaigns took a sample of the brand’s Twitter followers. They collected every Twitter post (“tweet”) by each of those followers over a seven-day period in June 2014. Every post was examined by a human annotator contracted through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Each tweet was categorized based on its content using a pre-specified scheme of 36 different categories, each representing a broad area of interest (e.g. politics, sports, family, etc.) Annotators were allowed to classify a post as belonging to more than one category. For example, a hypothetical post such as “I’m really excited to see grandpa go wreck shop in his geriatic soccer league this Sunday!” might be categorized as both “family” and “sports.” You get the picture.
Each row of social_marketing.csv represents one user, labeled by a random (anonymous, unique) 9-digit alphanumeric code. Each column represents an interest, which are labeled along the top of the data file. The entries are the number of posts by a given user that fell into the given category. Two interests of note here are “spam” (i.e. unsolicited advertising) and “adult” (posts that are pornographic, salacious, or explicitly sexual). There are a lot of spam and pornography “bots” on Twitter; while these have been filtered out of the data set to some extent, there will certainly be some that slip through. There’s also an “uncategorized” label. Annotators were told to use this sparingly, but it’s there to capture posts that don’t fit at all into any of the listed interest categories. (A lot of annotators may used the “chatter” category for this as well.) Keep in mind as you examine the data that you cannot expect perfect annotations of all posts. Some annotators might have simply been asleep at the wheel some, or even all, of the time! Thus there is some inevitable error and noisiness in the annotation process.
Your task to is analyze this data as you see fit, and to prepare a concise report for NutrientH20 that identifies any interesting market segments that appear to stand out in their social-media audience. You have complete freedom in deciding how to pre-process the data and how to define “market segment.” (Is it a group of correlated interests? A cluster? A latent factor? Etc.) Just use the data to come up with some interesting, well-supported insights about the audience, and be clear about what you did.
Revisit the Reuters C50 corpus that we explored in class. Your task is to build the best model you can, using any combination of tools you see fit, for predicting the author of an article on the basis of that article’s textual content. Describe clearly what models you are using, how you constructed features, and so forth. Yes, this is a supervised learning task, but it potentially draws on a lot of what you know about unsupervised learning, since constructing features for a document might involve dimensionality reduction.
In the C50train directory, you have ~50 articles from each of 50 different authors (one author per directory). Use this training data (and this data alone) to build the model. Then apply your model to predict the authorship of the articles in the C50test directory, which is about the same size as the training set. Describe your data pre-processing and analysis pipeline in detail.
Note: you will need to figure out a way to deal with words in the test set that you never saw in the training set. This is a nontrivial aspect of the modeling exercise. You might, for example, consider adding a pseudo-word to the training set vocabulary, corresponding to “word not seen before,” and add a pseudo-count to it so it doesn’t look like these out-of-vocabulary words have zero probability on the testing set. Or you might simply ignore those new words, at a possible cost in performance.
This question will be graded according to two criteria:
Use the data on grocery purchases in groceries.txt and find some interesting association rules for these shopping baskets. Pick your own thresholds for lift and confidence; just be clear what these thresholds are and how you picked them. Do your discovered item sets make sense? Present your discoveries in an interesting and concise way.
Notes: