This project presents a ML based solution for hiring companies to identify candidates who would have a suitable profile and have a high probability to be certified for a visa. EDA and data visualization were performed to identify key attributes that have a high degree of correlation with visa approval. A number of tree based models such as Decision Tree, Bagging classifier and Random Forest as well as Boosting methods (XGBoost, Gradient Boosting and AdaBoost) were explored. Model hyperparameters for each of these models were also tuned to see if it improved performance. XGBoost and tuned Random Forest performed the best amongst all models with recall scores of 88-90% and F1 score of 83%. Feature importances determined from these models combined with the findings of EDA were utilized to identify key attributes that can predict whether visa will be certified or denied. A suitable profile for applicants whose visa have a high chance of approval were recommended.
Business communities in the United States are facing high demand for human resources, but one of the constant challenges is identifying and attracting the right talent, which is perhaps the most important element in remaining competitive. Companies in the United States look for hard-working, talented, and qualified individuals both locally as well as abroad.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of the US permits foreign workers to come to the United States to work on either a temporary or permanent basis. The act also protects US workers against adverse impacts on their wages or working conditions by ensuring US employers' compliance with statutory requirements when they hire foreign workers to fill workforce shortages. The immigration programs are administered by the Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC).
OFLC processes job certification applications for employers seeking to bring foreign workers into the United States and grants certifications in those cases where employers can demonstrate that there are not sufficient US workers available to perform the work at wages that meet or exceed the wage paid for the occupation in the area of intended employment.
In FY 2016, the OFLC processed 775,979 employer applications for 1,699,957 positions for temporary and permanent labor certifications. This was a nine percent increase in the overall number of processed applications from the previous year. The process of reviewing every case is becoming a tedious task as the number of applicants is increasing every year.
The increasing number of applicants every year calls for a Machine Learning based solution that can help in shortlisting the candidates having higher chances of VISA approval. The goal of this project is to present a data-driven solution analyzing the existing data and, with the help of a classification model:
- Facilitate the process of visa approvals.
- Recommend a suitable profile for the applicants for whom the visa should be certified or denied based on the drivers that significantly influence the case status.
The data contains the different attributes of the employee and the employer. The detailed data dictionary is given below.
- case_id: ID of each visa application
- continent: Information of continent the employee
- education_of_employee: Information of education of the employee
- has_job_experience: Does the employee has any job experience? Y= Yes; N = No
- requires_job_training: Does the employee require any job training? Y = Yes; N = No
- no_of_employees: Number of employees in the employer's company
- yr_of_estab: Year in which the employer's company was established
- region_of_employment: Information of foreign worker's intended region of employment in the US.
- prevailing_wage: Average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment. The purpose of the prevailing wage is to ensure that the foreign worker is not underpaid compared to other workers offering the same or similar service in the same area of employment.
- unit_of_wage: Unit of prevailing wage. Values include Hourly, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly.
- full_time_position: Is the position of work full-time? Y = Full Time Position; N = Part Time Position
- case_status: Flag indicating if the Visa was certified or denied