Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
College/Unit
Statler College of Engineering and Mining Resources
Department/Program/Center
Industrial and Managements Systems Engineering
Abstract
Private giving represents more than three fourths of all U.S. charitable donations, about 2% of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Private giving is a significant factor in funding the nonprofit sector of the U.S. economy, which accounts for more than 10% of total GDP. Despite the abundance of data available through tax forms and other sources, it is unclear which factors influence private donation, and a reliable predictive mechanism remains elu- sive. This study aims to develop predictive models to accurately estimate future charitable giving based on a set of potentially influential factors. We have selected several factors, including unemployment rate, household income, poverty level, population, sex, age, ethnic- ity, education level, and number of vehicles per household. This study sheds light on the relationship between donation and these variables. We use Stepwise Regression to identify the most influential variables among the available variables, based on which predictive mod- els are developed. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and machine learning techniques, including Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) are used to develop the predictive models. The results suggest that population, education level, and the amount of charitable giving in the previous year are the most significant, independent variables. We propose three predictive models (MLR, ANN, and SVR) and validate them using 10-fold cross-validation method, then evaluate the performance using 9 different mea- suring criteria. All three models are capable of predicting the amount of future donations in a given region with good accuracy. Based on the evaluation criteria, using a test data set, ANN outperforms SVR and MLR in predicting the amount of charitable giving in the following year.
Digital Commons Citation
Farrokhvar, Leily; Ansari, Azadeh; and Kamali, Behrooz, "Predictive models for charitable giving using machine learning techniques" (2018). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 1323.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/1323
Source Citation
Citation: Farrokhvar L, Ansari A, Kamali B (2018) Predictive models for charitable giving using machine learning techniques. PLoS ONE 13(10): e0203928. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203928
Included in
Industrial Engineering Commons, Other Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons
Comments
Copyright: © 2018 Farrokhvar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.