# 15.5. Example: Where is the Land of Opportunity?¶

The US was nicknamed “the land of opportunity” because people believed that in the US even people with few resources can end up wealthy—economists call this economic mobility. In a famous study, economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues did a large-scale data analysis on economic mobility in the US . Chetty had a hunch that some places in the US have much higher economic mobility than others. His analysis found this to be true. He found that some cities, such as San Jose, Washington DC, and Seattle, have higher mobility than others, such as Charlotte, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. This means that overall, people move from low to high income brackets in San Jose at a higher rate compared to Charlotte. Chetty also used linear models to find that social and economic factors like segregation, income inequality, and local school systems are related to economic mobility. In this chapter, we use linear models to replicate parts of his analysis.

To do his analysis, Chetty used government tax records to get the incomes of everyone born in the US between 1980-82. He looked at each person’s income in 2011-12 when they were about 30 years old, and compared it to their parents’ income when they were born. In total, his dataset had about 10 million people. To measure economic mobility, Chetty took the people who were born into the 25th income percentile and found their income percentile 30 years later. He calls this statistic the absolute upward mobility (AUM). If a region’s average AUM is 25, then people in the 25th percentile generally stay in the 25th percentile—they remain where their parents were when they born. High AUM values mean that the region has more upward mobility. People in these regions are generally in a higher income bracket than their parents. For reference, the US average AUM is about 41 at the time of this writing. Chetty averaged together the AUMs for regions of the US called commuting zones (CZ). Commuting zones are defined by the economy of a region and are on the same scale as counties. While individual income records can’t be publicly available because of privacy, the AUMs for each commuting zone are publicly available, and since Chetty used commuting zone AUMs, we can replicate his analysis.

In this analysis, our outcome variable is the AUM for a commuting zone, since we are interested in finding features that explain AUM. There are many possible such features in Chetty’s data, but we first investigate one particular feature: the fraction of people in a CZ who have a 15-minute or shorter commute to work.

## 15.5.1. Explaining Upward Mobility using Commute Time¶

Let’s take a look at the Opportunity data. We’ll load the data into the DataFrame called cz_df.

cz_df

aum travel_lt15 gini rel_tot ... taxrate worked_14 foreign region
0 38.39 0.33 0.47 0.51 ... 0.02 3.75e-03 1.18e-02 South
1 37.78 0.28 0.43 0.54 ... 0.02 4.78e-03 2.31e-02 South
2 39.05 0.36 0.44 0.67 ... 0.01 2.89e-03 7.08e-03 South
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
702 44.12 0.42 0.42 0.29 ... 0.02 4.82e-03 9.85e-02 West
703 41.41 0.49 0.41 0.26 ... 0.01 4.39e-03 4.33e-02 West
704 43.20 0.24 0.42 0.32 ... 0.02 3.67e-03 1.13e-01 West

705 rows × 9 columns

Each row in the data frame represents one commuting zone. The column aum has the average AUM metric for the commuting zone. There are many columns in this data frame, but for now we focus on the fraction of people in a CZ that have a 15 minute or shorter commute time, which is called frac_traveltime_lt15. We plot AUM against this fraction to see the relationship between the two variables.

px.scatter(cz_df, x='travel_lt15', y='aum',
width=350, height=250)

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression

cz_df[['aum', 'travel_lt15']].corr()

aum travel_lt15
aum 1.00 0.68
travel_lt15 0.68 1.00
y = cz_df[['aum']]
X = cz_df[['travel_lt15']]

slr_aum = LinearRegression().fit(X, y)

print(f"Intercept: {slr_aum.intercept_}  Slope: {slr_aum.coef_[0]}")

Intercept: [31.27]  Slope: [28.66]

print(f"R-square: {slr_aum.score(X, y):.2f}")

R-square: 0.46

predicted_aum = slr_aum.predict(X)
errors = y - predicted_aum

np.std(errors)

aum    4.14
dtype: float64

np.std(cz_df['aum'])

5.614675842001113

<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x12678b970>


Note

We’ll work with $$\epsilon$$ more rigorously in future chapters. For now, the important idea to remember is that the model depends on $$x$$. For example, when $$\theta_1$$ is positive, bigger values of $$x$$ make the prediction $$f_{\theta}(x)$$ bigger.

## 15.5.2. Relating Upward Mobility Using Multiple Variables¶

Before, we used the fraction of people with a ≤15 min commute time to predict the AUM for a commuting zone. Now, we’d like to use a combination of predictors. In his original analysis, Chetty created nine high-level predictor categories like segregation, income, and K-12 education. We’ll take one predictor from each of Chetty’s categories for a total of nine predictors, described in Table 15.1.

Table 15.1 The nine variables we use to predict AUM

Column name

Description

frac_traveltime_lt15

Fraction of people with a ≤15 minute commute to work.

gini

Gini coefficient, an measure of wealth inequality. Values are between 0 and 1, where small values mean wealth is evenly distributed and large values mean more inequality.

dropout_r

High school dropout rate.

rel_tot

Fraction of people who self-reported as religious.

cs_fam_wkidsinglemom

Fraction of children with a single mother.

taxrate

Local tax rate.

frac_worked1416

Fraction of teenagers who are working.

cs_born_foreign

Fraction of people born outside the US.

Our original dataframe has around 40 predictors. We take a subset of the columns in the dataframe to create a design matrix $$\textbf{X}$$ and we extract the column of outcomes into a Series $$\mathbf{y}$$.

X2 = cz_df[['travel_lt15', 'single_mom']]

y = cz_df[['aum']]

model2 = LinearRegression().fit(X2, y)

print(f"Intercept: {model2.intercept_[0]:.1f}, \ntravel lt 15 min coefficient: {model2.coef_[0][0]:.2f},  \nfraction of single moms coefficient: {model2.coef_[0][1]:.2f}")

Intercept: 49.0,
travel lt 15 min coefficient: 18.10,
fraction of single moms coefficient: -63.98

predicted2 = model2.predict(X2)
errors2 = y - predicted2

<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x1268151c0>

np.std(errors2)

aum    2.85
dtype: float64

print(f"R-square: {model2.score(X2, y):.2f}")

R-square: 0.74

Design-matrix X has shape: (705, 1)
Response y has length: (705, 1)


Let’s look at X, a dataframe that we’re using as our design matrix. It has 479 observations and 9 predictors plus an intercept column:

predictors = [
'travel_lt15', 'gini', 'rel_tot', 'single_mom',
'taxrate', 'worked_14', 'foreign'
]

cz_df[(['aum'] + predictors)].corr()

aum travel_lt15 gini rel_tot single_mom taxrate worked_14 foreign
aum 1.00 0.68 -0.60 0.52 -0.77 0.35 0.65 -0.03
travel_lt15 0.68 1.00 -0.56 0.40 -0.42 0.34 0.60 -0.19
gini -0.60 -0.56 1.00 -0.29 0.57 -0.15 -0.58 0.31
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
taxrate 0.35 0.34 -0.15 0.08 -0.26 1.00 0.35 0.26
worked_14 0.65 0.60 -0.58 0.28 -0.60 0.35 1.00 -0.15
foreign -0.03 -0.19 0.31 -0.11 -0.04 0.26 -0.15 1.00

8 rows × 8 columns

Notice that our design matrix is a subset of our original dataframe—we just selected specific variables we want to use for prediction. Each row of our design matrix corresponds to an observation in our original data, and each column corresponds to a predictor variable.

Note

Once again, we’ll point out that people from different backgrounds use different terminology. For example, we say that each row in the design matrix $$X$$ is an observation and each column is a variable. This is more common among people with backgrounds in statistics. Others say that each column of the design matrix represents a feature. Also, we say that our overall process of fitting and interpreting models is called modeling, while others call it machine learning.

Now, let’s fit a multiple linear model. Recall that we’re using nine variables to predict AUM, the upward mobility for a commuting zone. As with the simple linear model, we’ll split our data into a training set and a test set.

To understand this error, we can start by comparing the multiple linear model with the simple linear model from before that only used the fraction with ≤15 min commute time.

We see that the multiple linear model has about 60% lower error than the simple linear model—a big improvement! Let’s make residual plots for both multiple and simple linear models.

X7 = cz_df[predictors]

model7 = LinearRegression().fit(X7, y)

predicted7 = model7.predict(X7)
errors7 = y - predicted7

<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x10c270790>

np.std(errors7)

aum    2.59
dtype: float64

print(f"R-square: {model7.score(X7, y):.2f}")

R-square: 0.79


We can see that the multiple linear model’s residuals are much closer to 0 in general, which helps to explain why the MSE is also lower.

Now, let’s look at our multiple linear model. Since our model has 7 predictor variables, we’ll show the model coefficients in a table rather than writing out the long model equation:

model7.coef_

array([[ 12.56,  -3.67,   7.65, -52.18,  36.57, 352.18,   4.94]])


Let’s look at the coefficient for gradrate_r, the college graduation rate. For a multiple linear model, we interpret this coefficient as saying: if we took two commuting zones that are the same in all predictors except gradrate_r, the model predicts that the commuting zone with a 0.1 larger gradrate_r also has a 0.051 higher AUM. The key difference for multiple linear models is that we only have a useful interpretation for a coefficient when we can hold the other predictors constant.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. As an extreme example, let’s say our model happened to have an extra predictor 2 * gradrate_r which doubles each value from gradrate_r. If our model had this predictor, it doesn’t make sense to talk about gradrate_r’s coefficient since we can’t hold 2 * gradrate_r constant. In general, we need to watch out for collinearity, where two predictor variables are highly correlated with each other. If our model has variables with high collinearity, we can’t make useful interpretations for the model coefficients.

To check for collinearity, we can look at the correlations between each pair of predictors, as shown in the heatmap below.

We see that cs_fam_wkidsinglemom, the fraction of families with a single mom, has a high correlation with several other predictors, like gini and frac_worked1416. Here, we face a central tension in modeling. If we want the most interpretable model, we should try to avoid collinearity. For instance, we could remove variables that are highly correlated with others. However, doing this often makes our model less accurate. Having an interpretable model can mean having a less accurate model. Is is better to have a highly interpretable model or a highly accurate one? It depends. Each modeling situation needs a different tradeoff, and it’s the job of the data scientist to understand and make this tradeoff.

So far, our model requires all of the predictor variables to be numeric. But categorical data is often useful for prediction as well.