Skip to content
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
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
# Import any additional modules and start coding below
# For lasso
from sklearn.linear_model import Lasso
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
# Run OLS
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error
# Random forest
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestRegressor
from sklearn.model_selection import RandomizedSearchCV
# Read in data
df_rental = pd.read_csv("rental_info.csv")
# Add information on rental duration
df_rental["rental_length"] = pd.to_datetime(df_rental["return_date"]) - pd.to_datetime(df_rental["rental_date"])
df_rental["rental_length_days"] = df_rental["rental_length"].dt.days
### Add dummy variables
# Add dummy for deleted scenes
df_rental["deleted_scenes"] = np.where(df_rental["special_features"].str.contains("Deleted Scenes"), 1, 0)
# Add dummy for behind the scenes
df_rental["behind_the_scenes"] = np.where(df_rental["special_features"].str.contains("Behind the Scenes"), 1, 0)
# Choose columns to drop
cols_to_drop = ["special_features", "rental_length", "rental_length_days", "rental_date", "return_date"]
# Split into feature and target sets
X = df_rental.drop(cols_to_drop, axis=1)
y = df_rental["rental_length_days"]
# Further split into training and test data
X_train,X_test,y_train,y_test = train_test_split(X,
y,
test_size=0.2,
random_state=9)
#the Lasso model
lasso = Lasso(alpha=0.3, random_state=9)
lasso.fit(X_train, y_train)
lasso_coef = lasso.coef_
#feature selection on columns with positive coefficients
X_lasso_train, X_lasso_test = X_train.iloc[:, lasso_coef > 0], X_test.iloc[:, lasso_coef > 0]
# OLS models run on lasso chosen regression
ols = LinearRegression()
ols = ols.fit(X_lasso_train, y_train)
y_test_pred = ols.predict(X_lasso_test)
mse_lin_reg_lasso = mean_squared_error(y_test, y_test_pred)
# Random forest hyperparameter space
param_dist = {'n_estimators': np.arange(1,101,1),
'max_depth':np.arange(1,11,1)}
# random forest regressor
rf = RandomForestRegressor()
# random search used to find the best hyperparameters
rand_search = RandomizedSearchCV(rf,
param_distributions=param_dist,
cv=5,
random_state=9)
#random search object fitted to the data
rand_search.fit(X_train, y_train)
#best hyper param variable
hyper_params = rand_search.best_params_
#random forest run 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)
# Random forest gives lowest MSE so:
best_model = rf
best_mse = mse_random_forest