This assignment is based on a data challenge from the Michigan Data Science Team (MDST).
The Michigan Data Science Team (MDST) and the Michigan Student Symposium for Interdisciplinary Statistical Sciences (MSSISS) have partnered with the City of Detroit to help solve one of the most pressing problems facing Detroit - blight. Blight violations are issued by the city to individuals who allow their properties to remain in a deteriorated condition. Every year, the city of Detroit issues millions of dollars in fines to residents and every year, many of these fines remain unpaid. Enforcing unpaid blight fines is a costly and tedious process, so the city wants to know: how can we increase blight ticket compliance?
The first step in answering this question is understanding when and why a resident might fail to comply with a blight ticket. This is where predictive modeling comes in. For this assignment, your task is to predict whether a given blight ticket will be paid on time.
All data for this assignment has been provided to us through the Detroit Open Data Portal.
Each row corresponds to a single blight ticket, and includes information about when, why, and to whom each ticket was issued. The target variable is compliance, which is True if the ticket was paid early, on time, or within one month of the hearing data, False if the ticket was paid after the hearing date or not at all, and Null if the violator was found not responsible.
Note: All tickets where the violators were found not responsible are not considered during evaluation. They are included in the training set as an additional source of data for visualization, and to enable unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches. However, they are not included in the test set.
File descriptions
train.csv - the training set (all tickets issued 2004-2011)
addresses.csv & latlons.csv - mapping from ticket id to addresses, and from addresses to lat/lon coordinates.
Note: misspelled addresses may be incorrectly geolocated.