Predictive Analytics on Business License Data Using Deep Learning

Project Overview:

The purpose of this project is to predict whether a business license will be active or not using deep learning and machine learning techniques. We’ll explore, clean, and prepare a dataset with more than 86,000 businesses for modeling. So, for one we’re going to build out a baseline model using H2O’s Random Forest and then a more complex Deep Neural Network (DNN) using TensorFlow.

At the end of all this, you will have built a system that can foresee what is most likely to happen with a business license application.

Key Features:

• Tools: TensorFlow, H2O, Python libraries (pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn, scikit-learn.
• Outcome: Predict business license statuses such as Approved, Renewed, or Revoked.
• Use case: Predictive analytics for businesses, government regulations, or consultancy services.

Prerequisites

Before working, please ensure that you have the following:

• Google Colab or a local working Python environment
• Knowledge in libraries like TensorFlow, H2O, Pandas, seaborn, and NumPy, scikit-learn libraries
• Knowledge regarding machine learning concepts and deep learning techniques.
• Business License dataset

Approach

We follow a structured approach:

• Data Collection: Collect a dataset that contains data on 86,000 different businesses and their licensing details.
• Data Preparation: Clean and preprocess the available data for model training.
• Model Building: There are two models we built to establish a baseline. We implemented a random forest baseline model using H20 and deep learning neural networks using TensorFlow
• Evaluation: We run and evaluate the model using some essential parameters like accuracy.

Workflow and Methodology

The overall workflow of this project includes:

• Data Preparation: Load and clean the dataset of business licenses. Then handle missing values and normalize data features.
• Exploratory Data Analysis: Analyze data distribution and relationships between features to understand patterns.
• Baseline Model with H2O: Build a Random Forest baseline model using the H2O framework to predict license statuses.
• DNN Setup: Train a DNN model using TensorFlow including dropout regularization.
• Evaluation: Test the trained model with test data. Then calculate accuracy and loss metrics for performance evaluation.
• Prediction: Use the trained DNN model to make predictions on unseen data

The methodology involves:

• Supervised learning: We train the model with labeled data to predict license statuses.
• Feature engineering: Important features like license type, business type, and ZIP code are used for predictions.
• Model training: We use cross-entropy loss for the DNN and Gini Impurity for the random forest.

Data Collection

First, we load a business license dataset with detailed information about businesses, including license number, license description, license status, application type, and so on from Kaggle. It helps us predict if a business license will be issued, renewed, or revoked.

Data Preparation

After collecting the dataset, we will prepare the data and clean it before modeling. It involves handling missing values, how to encode categorical variables, and how to split the dataset into training and testing sets.

Data Preparation Workflow:

1. Handle missing values: To ensure the model's reliability, we either fill in or remove the data points that are missing.
2. Categorical encoding: Convert categorical features into numerical values using one-hot encoding.
3. Train-test split: Split the dataset on train test split (i.e. 80% for training and 20% for test) so that the model works well on new data.