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Project: Predicting Movie Rental Durations
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  • A DVD rental company needs your help! They want to figure out how many days a customer will rent a DVD for based on some features and has approached you for help. They want you to try out some regression models which will help predict the number of days a customer will rent a DVD for. The company wants a model which yeilds a MSE of 3 or less on a test set. The model you make will help the company become more efficient inventory planning.

    The data they provided is in the csv file rental_info.csv. It has the following features:

    • "rental_date": The date (and time) the customer rents the DVD.
    • "return_date": The date (and time) the customer returns the DVD.
    • "amount": The amount paid by the customer for renting the DVD.
    • "amount_2": The square of "amount".
    • "rental_rate": The rate at which the DVD is rented for.
    • "rental_rate_2": The square of "rental_rate".
    • "release_year": The year the movie being rented was released.
    • "length": Lenght of the movie being rented, in minuites.
    • "length_2": The square of "length".
    • "replacement_cost": The amount it will cost the company to replace the DVD.
    • "special_features": Any special features, for example trailers/deleted scenes that the DVD also has.
    • "NC-17", "PG", "PG-13", "R": These columns are dummy variables of the rating of the movie. It takes the value 1 if the move is rated as the column name and 0 otherwise. For your convinience, the reference dummy has already been dropped.
    import pandas as pd
    import numpy as np
    import datetime
    
    from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
    from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
    from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor
    from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeRegressor
    from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
    
    df = pd.read_csv("rental_info.csv", parse_dates=["rental_date", "return_date"])
    df.head()
    df["rental_length_days"] = (df["return_date"] - df["rental_date"]).dt.days
    df.head()
    df["deleted_scenes"] =  np.where(df["special_features"].str.contains("Deleted Scenes"), 1,0)
    
    df["behind_the_scenes"] =  np.where(df["special_features"].str.contains("Behind the Scenes"), 1,0)
    
    df.info()
    X = df.drop(["rental_length_days", "special_features", "rental_date", "return_date"], axis=1)
    y = df["rental_length_days"]
    
    X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=9)
    
    from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
    from sklearn.model_selection import RandomizedSearchCV
        
    linreg = LinearRegression()
    linreg.fit(X_train, y_train)
    linreg_pred = linreg.predict(X_test)
    linreg_mse = mean_squared_error(y_test, linreg_pred)
    print("LinearRegressor has a MSE of {}".format(linreg_mse))
    
    dt = DecisionTreeRegressor()
    dt.fit(X_train, y_train)
    dt_pred = dt.predict(X_test)
    dt_mse = mean_squared_error(y_test, dt_pred)
    print("DecisionTreeRegressor has a MSE of {}".format(dt_mse))
    
    # Random forest hyperparameter space
    param_dist = {'n_estimators': np.arange(1,101,1),
              'max_depth':np.arange(1,11,1)}
    
    # Create a random forest regressor
    rf = RandomForestRegressor()
    
    # Use random search to find the best hyperparameters
    rand_search = RandomizedSearchCV(rf, 
                                     param_distributions=param_dist, 
                                     cv=5, 
                                     random_state=9)
    
    # Fit the random search object to the data
    rand_search.fit(X_train, y_train)
    
    # Create a variable for the best hyper param
    hyper_params = rand_search.best_params_
    
    # Run the random forest on the chosen hyper parameters
    rf = RandomForestRegressor(n_estimators=hyper_params["n_estimators"], 
                               max_depth=hyper_params["max_depth"], 
                               random_state=9)
    rf.fit(X_train,y_train)
    rf_pred = rf.predict(X_test)
    mse_random_forest= mean_squared_error(y_test, rf_pred)
    
    print("RandomForestRegressor has a MSE of {}".format(mse_random_forest))
    best_model = dt
    best_mse = dt_mse