Hybrid Machine Learning Models for Crowdfunding Success Prediction
摘要
Crowdfunding has become a viable option for founders and entrepreneurs as an alternative source of funding, where individuals can access a large pool of supporters to fill the funding gap. There are a variety of reasons why it is difficult to predict if crowdfunding project will be successful. As such, types of projects, duration of the campaign, target funding goal, and overall supporter activity are constantly changing. This research, therefore, aims to explore, the use of machine learning for predictive models that quantitatively leverage the historical records of projects on kickstarter, in order to find the success probability. In order to analyze the predictive ability for campaign success, was used a combination of machine learning models - Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and Decision Trees - the models that had the greatest precision were Decision Tree (99.91% acc), and LightGBM (99.90% acc) hence why they were selected. In addition, this research demonstrates how feature selection coupled with ensemble learning can significantly increase predictive potential by providing valuable information for campaign builders, platform operators, and investors who are undertaking crowdfunding projects. These findings indicate that predictive modelling can support campaign design, promote investor trust, and enhance credibility for crowdfunding platforms, through uncovering fraud. Additional measures measuring social media interaction or sentiment analysis could be incorporated to provide information for better predictive models.