Project overview
The 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey captured tens of thousands of responses describing skills, experience, location, work preferences, and compensation. Your job is to turn that raw, messy dataset into a linear regression model that predicts yearly salary and reveals the factors behind developer pay.
You’ll work through a full data science workflow: auditing and dropping sparse columns, filtering outlier salaries, engineering features from multi-select skill lists, encoding high-cardinality categories, and managing multicollinearity before training and evaluating your model. Along the way, you’ll interpret coefficients to separate controllable factors like skills and role from fixed ones like geography.
Build and evaluate a linear regression model on Stack Overflow survey data to predict developer salaries and surface the factors that drive compensation.
Key skill required
To complete this project, it's recommended to build these foundational skills in Python
- Familiarity with pandas
- Basic machine learning concepts, train/test splitting
- Handling missing data and outliers in real-world datasets
- Feature engineering and encoding categorical variables
Projects steps
Step 1: Explore the raw survey
Step 2: Trim to salary respondents and retire low-value columns
Step 3: Shape the modeling dataset
Step 4: Engineer features and build the salary model
Step 5: Next Steps
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