Python Tutorial : The basetable timeline

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/intermediate-predictive-analytics-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Hi! Welcome to the second Predictive Analytics course! My name is Nele, I'm a data scientist at Python Predictions. In the first course, you learned to build predictive models, evaluate them and present them to business. In this course, you will take one step back, and learn how to build the basetable that is used to build the predictive model. A predictive model can be used to predict an event. All information needed to make these predictions are stored in the basetable. There are three important concepts in the basetable. The population is the group of people or objects you want to make a prediction for. The candidate predictors describe the objects in the population. It is information that can be used to predict the event. Finally, the target has information about the event to predict itself. It is one if the event occurs, and zero otherwise. When building a basetable for predictive modeling, the first thing you should do is draw a timeline. On this timeline, you can depict the situation in which you want to use the predictive model. For instance, assume that you want to construct a predictive model that predicts which donors are most likely to donate at least 50 Euro in the next 3 months. You want to use this model on May 1st 2018, because then you want to send a letter to these donors. The timeline shows that the predictive model can only use information that is available on May 1st 2018. Everything that happens after May 1st 2018, is unknown at the time you use the model. As the true target is unknown by definition, you need to reconstruct your timeline in the past such that information is available about the target period. For instance, if you have donations information about 2017, you could use a timeline that goe