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 predictive model using various machine learning algorithms and to document the end-to-end steps using a template. The Truck APS Failure dataset is a binary classification situation where we are trying to predict one of the two possible outcomes.

INTRODUCTION: The dataset consists of data collected from heavy Scania trucks in everyday usage. The system in focus is the Air Pressure system (APS), which generates pressurized air that supports functions such as braking and gear changes. The dataset’s positive class consists of component failures for a specific component of the APS system. The negative class consists of trucks with failures for components not related to the APS.

The training set contains 60000 examples in total, in which 59000 belong to the negative class and 1000 positive class. The test set contains 16000 examples.

The challenge is to minimize the total cost of a prediction model the sum of “Cost_1” multiplied by the number of Instances with type 1 failure and “Cost_2” with the number of instances with type 2 failure. The “Cost_1” variable refers to the cost resulted from a redundant check by a mechanic at the workshop. Meanwhile, the “Cost_2” variable refers to the cost of not catching a faulty truck.

In this Take1 iteration, we will construct and tune machine learning models for this dataset using the Scikit-Learn library. We will observe the best ROC/AUC result that we can obtain using the tuned models with the training and test datasets.

ANALYSIS: From this Take1 iteration, the performance of the machine learning algorithms achieved an average ROC/AUC of 94.20%. Two algorithms (Extra Trees and Gradient Boosting) achieved the top accuracy metrics after the first round of modeling. After a series of tuning trials, the Gradient Boosting model produced a ROC/AUC metric of 82.70%. When configured with the optimized parameters, the Gradient Boosting model processed the test dataset with an accuracy of 86.17%, which indicated a high variance issue. We will need to apply regularization techniques before deploying the model for production use.

CONCLUSION: For this iteration, the Gradient Boosting model achieved the best overall results using the training and test datasets. For this dataset, we should consider using the Extra Trees algorithm for further modeling.

Dataset Used: APS Failure at Scania Trucks Data Set

Dataset ML Model: Binary classification with numerical attributes

Dataset Reference: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/APS+Failure+at+Scania+Trucks

One potential source of performance benchmark: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/APS+Failure+at+Scania+Trucks

The HTML formatted report can be found here on GitHub.