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/

FundAClassroom.Today

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