FundAClassroom.today Inspire your supporters on DonorsChoose.org Bobby Kim, Fellow at Insight Data Science
Aug 13, 2015
FundAClassroom.todayInspire your supporters on DonorsChoose.org
Bobby Kim, Fellow at Insight Data Science
What is the problem?
• In 2013-2014, US teachers on average $513 out-of-pocket for their classrooms.1
• DonorsChoose.org, an online crowdfunded charity is helping reduce the burden.
• Can we predict whether a project will be funded or not based simply on a teacher’s essay?
1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleleinbachreyhle/2014/08/19/teachers-spend-own-money-school-supplies/
Supervised learning – binary classification
• Data: CSV dataset from DonorsChoose.org
• ~200,000 essays going back to 2012 – 75/25 Funded/Not Funded
• Vectorize DonorsChoose essays using tf-idf, build vocabulary of 4000 words
• Model: L2 Logistic Regression
• Validation:
• 5-fold cross validation for model tuning using training set (90%)
• ROC AUC using test set (10%)
About me• PhD in Computational Biophysics, Rice University
• Built models for protein folding simulations using experimental protein structures and sequence data
Future Directions• Feature Engineering using NLP
• TextBlob – sentiment analysis, lemmatization, parts of speech tagging, misspelling
• TextSTAT – reading level, subjectivity
• Supervised learning
• SVMs
Essay Format• Paragraph 1 – Open with the challenge facing your
students.
• Paragraph 2 – Tell us more about your students.
• Paragraph 3 – Inspire your potential donors with an overview of the resources you’re requesting
• Paragraph 4 – Close by sharing why your project is so important
Data Story