This notebook is an exercise in the Introduction to Machine Learning course. You can reference the tutorial at this link.


Recap

So far, you have loaded your data and reviewed it with the following code. Run this cell to set up your coding environment where the previous step left off.

Exercises

Step 1: Specify Prediction Target

Select the target variable, which corresponds to the sales price. Save this to a new variable called y. You'll need to print a list of the columns to find the name of the column you need.

Step 2: Create X

Now you will create a DataFrame called X holding the predictive features.

Since you want only some columns from the original data, you'll first create a list with the names of the columns you want in X.

You'll use just the following columns in the list (you can copy and paste the whole list to save some typing, though you'll still need to add quotes):

After you've created that list of features, use it to create the DataFrame that you'll use to fit the model.

Review Data

Before building a model, take a quick look at X to verify it looks sensible

Step 3: Specify and Fit Model

Create a DecisionTreeRegressor and save it iowa_model. Ensure you've done the relevant import from sklearn to run this command.

Then fit the model you just created using the data in X and y that you saved above.

Step 4: Make Predictions

Make predictions with the model's predict command using X as the data. Save the results to a variable called predictions.

Think About Your Results

Use the head method to compare the top few predictions to the actual home values (in y) for those same homes. Anything surprising?

[It's natural to ask how accurate the model's predictions will be and how you can improve that. That will be you're next step.

Keep Going

You are ready for Model Validation.


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