Capstone Project

David Cuervo

Objective

Explore the relationship between industrial toxic releases and the socioeconomic demographics of the neighborhoods they are in.

Do poorer neighborhoods or predominantly minority neighborhoods have more pounds of toxic releases compared to wealthier, white neighborhoods?

Repository Contents

• Raw Data folder
• Cleaned Data folder
• EDA notebook
• Modeling notebook
• Presentation slides

Exploratory Data Analysis

Identified top 10 most polluted counties

Top polluters in Texas

Top 10 Chemicals Released

Results

• Built linear and logistic regression, decision tree, and random forest models
• Most accurate was the random forest: 45.22%

Top 4 Features

Conclusions

• Some relation between poverty and toxins released
• The higher the Asian population, the less toxins releases in that ZIP code
• American Indians only make up 1% of the Texan population
• Future studies could explore:
  • More states, not just Texas
  • The number of actual industries in a neighborhood, not the pounds of toxins released
  • Other sources of pollution such as: bus depots, water treatment facilities, municipal waste sites