PleaseRepay.me

So you think you know what makes a good borrower?

Well, at least 300 Redditors stole some money from lenders on /r/borrow.

What it does

Having seen more than 12,000 loan requests, www.reddit.com/r/borrow/ holds a ton of information on what types of Redditors are trustworthy. PleaseRepay.me seeks to capitalize on this information, and use it to predict the outcome of a given loan.

How it's done

We categorize all "[REQ]" threads on /r/borrow into three buckets:

• Repaid
• Unpaid
• Loan Unfulfilled (No lender willing to give a loan)

Using a process known as Machine Learning, we analyzed [REQ]uesters for more than 30 characteristics. We asked the question: If a user has a certain characteristic, does it correlate to the user being in a certain bucket?

After taking note of the characteristics that correlate with each bucket, we can predict what bucket any old Redditor belongs to.

Why it's awesome

Our algorithm is quite good at predicting outcomes, with an F1 Score of more than 95%.

Other stuff

Special shoutout goes to /u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix for providing the data for this project!

Running it locally

Create a file backend/app/prediction/settings.py with variables CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, USERNAME, PASSWORD corresponding to your Reddit API settings

Installing Dependancies

brew install redis
redis-server

// In another tab
cd frontend
npm install 
bash rebuild
cd ../backend
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Launching the app

cd ../frontend
bash rebuild.sh
cd ../backend
python3 manage.py runsever