A machine learning approach to predict ethnicity using personal name and census location in Canada

PloS One
Kai On WongYutaka Yasui

Abstract

Canada is an ethnically-diverse country, yet its lack of ethnicity information in many large databases impedes effective population research and interventions. Automated ethnicity classification using machine learning has shown potential to address this data gap but its performance in Canada is largely unknown. This study conducted a large-scale machine learning framework to predict ethnicity using a novel set of name and census location features. Using census 1901, the multiclass and binary class classification machine learning pipelines were developed. The 13 ethnic categories examined were Aboriginal (First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and all-combined)), Chinese, English, French, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Scottish, and others. Machine learning algorithms included regularized logistic regression, C-support vector, and naïve Bayes classifiers. Name features consisted of the entire name string, substrings, double-metaphones, and various name-entity patterns, while location features consisted of the entire location string and substrings of province, district, and subdistrict. Predictive performance metrics included sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, F1, Area Under the Curve for Re...Continue Reading

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
feature extraction

Software Mentioned

Pandas
Python
Metaphone
Numpy
Learn
Statsmodels
Scikit

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