Which cities should Bajaj Finance open in next?

Which cities should Bajaj Finance open in next? These are my recommendations for where Bajaj Finance should start offering financial products next.

Now that my ACT and SAT exams are over, I’m back to blogging. Before my work on predicting the FM Auctions using a regression model, I left off talking about building a model that uses recommender systems to predict where franchises should open next – suggest to them the cities which are more suitable for their business. I spent the most of the last two months building and fine-tuning this same model.

It took many weeks to collect this data – 26 franchises and 1476 cities worth of data – and many more weeks to refine it – optimizing the data for each franchise, removing duplicate entries (a city like Tiruchirappalli, I learnt, can have up to 8 different spellings), cross-checking that data against Annual reports and Earnings Presentations, deciding on a resolution for each franchise (Should a store in Thane be counted as a store in Mumbai?) – that sort of thing.

After all this work, I’m proud to say that I can now deliver: Here is my presentation on where Bajaj Finance should open branches next. Here is the code behind it.

I will be uploading recommendations like this one for every franchise I can get my hands on over the next few weeks. I will also be talking about more technical matters – gathering, cleaning the data behind the model, analyzing and building the model and tracking how my ‘predictions’ perform over the new few months. Stay tuned for what’s to come.