The Kaggle Bosch Production Line Performance competition is trying to identify parts that will fail quality control. I have tinkered with one other Kaggle competition, the one to predict who survived the sinking of the Titanic. The Bosch competition has much more data than Titanic. The number of parts that Bosch manufactures is much larger than the number of people that can fit on a boat. Because of the size of the data and the fact that it is split into three files, it will be hard to just load all the data into Weka like I did for Titanic. At least that is the excuse I used to start writing code to analyze the data.

There are three types of data files provided. The numeric data file contains the Response column that contains the 0 for a successfully manufactured part and 1 for a part that failed quality control. The second data file is categorical data and the third is time data identifying when measurements were taken. I chose to start with the numeric data file for two reasons. First, it has the Result column so it can be studied without joining to another file, and second because I have less experience analyzing numeric ranges and learning is the real goal of this activity.

Before starting to work up a model to predict success or failure, I needed a better sense of the data. The first run was to read in the all the rows from the numeric training data and count up the ones and zeros for each Response value. Results of the first run showed that only 6879 rows were products that failed quality control compared to 1176868 successful products. The naive model of always saying a product was successfully manufactured would be correct over 99% of the time, but that is not likely to win the competition.

The second run is to take the counts of ones and zeros for each feature and look for ratios where the ones to zeros for that feature was greater than the overall ratio of ones to zeros. That will be the topic of the next post.