Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- All Subjects: Machine Learning
From a technical perspective, I used Python for the whole project, while also using HTML/CSS for the front-end of the application. As for key packages, I used Keras, an open source neural network library to build the model; data preprocessing was done using sklearn’s various subpackages. All charts and graphs were done using data visualization libraries matplotlib and seaborn. These charts provided insight as to what the final dataset looked like. They showed how the brand distribution is relatively close to what it should be, while the gender distribution was heavily skewed. Future work on this project would involve expanding the dataset, automating the entirety of the data retrieval process, and finally deploying the project on the cloud for users everywhere to use the application.
The e-commerce market utilizes information to target customers and drive business. More and more online services have become available, allowing consumers to make purchases and interact with an online system. For example, Amazon is one of the largest Internet-based retail companies. As people shop through this website, Amazon gathers huge amounts of data on its customers from personal information to shopping history to viewing history. After purchasing a product, the customer may leave reviews and give a rating based on their experience. Performing analytics on all of this data can provide insights into making more informed business and marketing decisions that can lead to business growth and also improve the customer experience.
For this thesis, I have trained binary classification models on a publicly available product review dataset from Amazon to predict whether a review has a positive or negative sentiment. The sentiment analysis process includes analyzing and encoding the human language, then extracting the sentiment from the resulting values. In the business world, sentiment analysis provides value by revealing insights into customer opinions and their behaviors. In this thesis, I will explain how to perform a sentiment analysis and analyze several different machine learning models. The algorithms for which I compared the results are KNN, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, Linear Support Vector Machines, and Support Vector Machines with an RBF kernel.
In order to train the model, data was collected from the NBA statistics website. The model was trained on games dating from the 2010 NBA season through the 2017 NBA season. Three separate models were built, predicting the winner, predicting the total points, and finally predicting the margin of victory for a team. These models learned on 80 percent of the data and validated on the other 20 percent. These models were trained for 40 epochs with a batch size of 15.
The model for predicting the winner achieved an accuracy of 65.61 percent, just slightly below the accuracy of other experts in the field of predicting the NBA. The model for predicting total points performed decently as well, it could beat Las Vegas’ prediction 50.04 percent of the time. The model for predicting margin of victory also did well, it beat Las Vegas 50.58 percent of the time.