Week 6 AnalystLab Africa Data Science Internship Project focusing on Feature Engineering, Feature Selection, Model Optimization, and Hyperparameter Tuning for House Price Prediction using Gradient Boosting Regressor.
# Week 6: Feature Engineering & Model Optimization
## AnalystLab Africa Data Science Internship
### Project Overview
This project focuses on improving machine learning performance through feature engineering and model optimization using the Housing Dataset.
## Objectives
- Create meaningful features from raw data.
- Transform variables for machine learning.
- Select the most informative features.
- Optimize the regression model using GridSearchCV.
- Evaluate performance before and after optimization.
## Feature Engineering
The following features were created:
- Area per Bedroom
- Total Rooms
- Parking Availability
- Luxury House Indicator
## Feature Selection
Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) selected the ten most informative features for model training.
## Model Used
Gradient Boosting Regressor
## Hyperparameter Tuning
GridSearchCV
Best Parameters:
- Learning Rate = 0.05
- Max Depth = 2
- Number of Estimators = 100
## Performance
Baseline Model
- MAE: 1,047,683.40
- RMSE: 1,401,484.80
- R² Score: 0.6114
Optimized Model
- MAE: 1,074,514.60
- RMSE: 1,446,907.33
- R² Score: 0.5858
## Technologies
- Python
- Pandas
- NumPy
- Scikit-learn
- Matplotlib
- Jupyter Notebook
## Author
Brian Otieno Odhiambo