Template Credit: Adapted from a template made available by Dr. Jason Brownlee of Machine Learning Mastery.

SUMMARY: The purpose of this project is to construct a prediction model using various machine learning algorithms and to document the end-to-end steps using a template. The Online News Popularity dataset is a regression situation where we are trying to predict the value of a continuous variable.

INTRODUCTION: This dataset summarizes a heterogeneous set of features about articles published by Mashable in a period of two years. The goal is to predict the article’s popularity level in social networks. The dataset does not contain the original content, but some statistics associated with it. The original content can be publicly accessed and retrieved using the provided URLs.

Many thanks to K. Fernandes, P. Vinagre and P. Cortez. A Proactive Intelligent Decision Support System for Predicting the Popularity of Online News. Proceedings of the 17th EPIA 2015 – Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, September, Coimbra, Portugal, for making the dataset and benchmarking information available.

ANALYSIS: The baseline performance of the machine learning algorithms achieved an average RMSE of 13020. Two algorithms (Linear Regression and ElasticNet) achieved the top RMSE scores after the first round of modeling. After a series of tuning trials, ElasticNet turned in the top result using the training data. It achieved the best RMSE of 11273. Using the optimized tuning parameter available, the Stochastic Gradient Boosting algorithm processed the validation dataset with an RMSE of 12089, which was slightly worse than the accuracy of the training data.

CONCLUSION: For this iteration, the ElasticNet algorithm achieved the top training and validation results comparing to other machine learning algorithms. For this dataset, ElasticNet should be considered for further modeling or production use.

Dataset Used: Online News Popularity Dataset

Dataset ML Model: Regression with numerical attributes

Dataset Reference: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Online+News+Popularity

The HTML formatted report can be found here on GitHub.