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Is This School Bus Broken Down or Just Late?

From the reason given, the route, the run type, the borough and the bus company, is this incident a breakdown or a delay? Breakdowns need a replacement bus, and delays need a message to parents.

Use caseEngineeringPredictionModel evaluation

The table

School bus incidents reported in New York City from 2015 to 2017, with reason, route, run type, borough and company, labelled breakdown or running late. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Bus Breakdown and Delays in NYC, 2015 to 2017, 147,972 rows by 21 columns, licensed CC0: Public Domain. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.86. At 147,972 rows and 20 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="bus breakdown delays NYC", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. ROC AUC runs from 0.5, a coin toss, to 1, a perfect ranking, and a lower Brier score means the probabilities can be trusted more. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="classification", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "roc_auc_mean", "brier_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features),
                        "probability": model.predict_proba(features).max(axis=1)}))

What you get

A label per incidentBreakdown or delay, with a probability.
Faster dispatchSend a replacement bus as soon as a breakdown is likely.
A strong signalThe catalogue measures a high signal.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "bus breakdown delays NYC", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".