How Much is your Used Car Worth?

Nov 20, 2023

Story

I graduated from college in May 2022, and just three weeks later I moved to Houston to get settled in before starting my new job. I didn't have a car when I first moved to Houston and I decided to give it a try and see how life was without a car there. It took me about a day to realize that I absolutely needed a car...
I went to two dealerships to ask about prices of used cars and quickly realized that prices were really high! I was quite suprised to see how expensive used cars were. So I decided that I needed to narrow down my list of options and look only for cars that I knew I could afford. This is when I decided to introduce a bit of Data Science and Machine Learning to this issue.

Solution

I scraped used cars for sale in Craiglist and compiled a dataset of over 400k cars including many features about each one of them. Then, I created a Machine Learning model where my main interest was to understand the variables influencing the price of the car, and more importantly I wanted to play with the different features and obtain a close price estimate of the car. This project allowed me to narrow down my list of potential cars to buy to only a couple of cars, and my search became a lot more targeted and less time consuming.

Interact with the model!!!

Technical Aspects

This was the first time that a machine learning model I created made it out of my Jupyter Notebook in my local machine, huge success! I created an app using Streamlit and I was able to use the model that I trained in this app, which is now up and running.

Tech Stacks

ML model:

APP:

Web Scraping:

  • BeautifulSoup
  • Requests

DevOps:

  • Git
  • Github