Capstone Project: Complete ML System
Project Overview
You’ll build a Customer Churn Prediction System - predicting which customers will leave a subscription service. This project synthesizes everything you’ve learned:- Data exploration and cleaning
- Feature engineering
- Model selection and evaluation
- Deployment considerations
Part 1: Problem Definition
Business Context
A telecom company loses 15-20% of customers monthly. Each lost customer costs:- Revenue loss: $500-2000/year
- Acquisition cost for replacement: $300-500
Success Metrics
| Metric | Target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Recall | > 70% | Catch most churners |
| Precision | > 50% | Don’t waste retention budget |
| AUC-ROC | > 0.80 | Overall discriminative power |
Part 2: Data Exploration
Exploratory Analysis
Part 3: Feature Engineering
Prepare for Modeling
Part 4: Model Development
Baseline Models
Hyperparameter Tuning
Part 5: Model Evaluation
Detailed Metrics
Feature Importance
Part 6: Business Impact Analysis
Part 7: Production Considerations
Model Serialization
Inference Pipeline
Monitoring Dashboard
Project Checklist
1
Problem Definition
✅ Clear business objective and success metrics
2
Data Exploration
✅ Understand data quality, distributions, and patterns
3
Feature Engineering
✅ Create meaningful features from domain knowledge
4
Model Development
✅ Compare multiple algorithms, tune hyperparameters
5
Evaluation
✅ Use appropriate metrics, analyze errors
6
Business Impact
✅ Translate ML metrics to business value
7
Production
✅ Plan for deployment, monitoring, and maintenance
🏆 Congratulations!
You've Completed the Capstone!
You’ve built a complete, production-ready ML system from scratch. You now have:
- Technical Skills: Data exploration, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment
- Business Acumen: Translating ML metrics to business impact
- Production Mindset: Monitoring, maintenance, and continuous improvement
📝 Portfolio Documentation Template
How to Present This Project to Employers
How to Present This Project to Employers
Project Summary (for your portfolio/resume)
Title: Customer Churn Prediction SystemBusiness Impact:- Identifies 70%+ of at-risk customers 2 weeks before churn
- Enables targeted retention campaigns
- Estimated $X00K annual savings in customer lifetime value
- End-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to production API
- Comparison of 5+ algorithms (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, etc.)
- Feature engineering creating 20+ derived features
- Threshold optimization for business-aligned precision-recall tradeoff
- Monitoring and alerting system for model drift
- Python, scikit-learn, XGBoost, pandas, numpy
- FastAPI for model serving
- MLflow for experiment tracking
- Docker for containerization
GitHub README Structure
Interview Talking Points
-
“Walk me through this project”
- Start with business problem (churn costs $X)
- Explain data exploration findings
- Discuss feature engineering decisions
- Compare model approaches
- Show business impact calculation
-
“What was the biggest challenge?”
- Class imbalance (70/30 split)
- Feature engineering from raw transaction data
- Choosing the right threshold for business needs
-
“How would you improve it?”
- Real-time predictions with streaming
- A/B testing different interventions
- Incorporating more data sources
- Automated retraining pipeline
🔗 Complete ML Mastery Checklist
Skills You’ve Mastered Across This Course:
You’re now ready for:
| Category | Skills | Modules |
|---|---|---|
| Fundamentals | Linear models, loss functions, gradient descent | 1-3 |
| Classification | Logistic regression, metrics, thresholds | 4-4b |
| Algorithms | Trees, ensembles, SVM, Naive Bayes | 5-6 |
| Evaluation | Cross-validation, precision/recall, ROC | 7 |
| Data Skills | Feature engineering, handling messy data | 8 |
| Optimization | Hyperparameter tuning | 9 |
| End-to-End | Complete pipelines | 10, 19 |
| Unsupervised | Clustering, dimensionality reduction | 11, 18 |
| Deep Learning | Neural networks basics | 12 |
| Production | Regularization, deployment, monitoring | 13, 14 |
| Time Series | Forecasting techniques | 15 |
| Theory | Bias-variance, data leakage | 16-17 |
| Real-World | Imbalanced data, explainability | 20-23 |
- ML Engineer roles (junior to mid-level)
- Data Scientist positions
- AI/ML-focused software engineering
- Further study in deep learning, NLP, or computer vision