University of Wisconsin Extended Campus is now Wisconsin Online Collaboratives! This name reflects the partnerships of the 13 universities within the Universities of Wisconsin–our state's premier system of public higher education. Through these partnerships we will continue to support online degrees, certificates and courses–along with support services to you.

Capstone Projects

Equitable Outcomes: Understanding and Monitoring Mortgage Decisions

Program: Data Science Master's
Location: Not Specified (remote)
Student: Whitney Stoker

This project investigated mortgage lending decisions through the lens of protected class data. It described the recent history of mortgage lending for the last century and analyzed HMDA data from 2018-2022 using ANOVA and Chi-squared tests for analyzing variances between groups; and random forest and boosted tree classifiers and regressors for descriptive modeling. The author used model outputs to describe equity between protected class population subset decisions specific industries, geographies, and financial institutions. In larger datasets where bias was detected, the study delved into subcategories of data to determine the true scope of iniquity. The results found statistically significant differences between protected class subsets within specific financial institutions and underwriting systems.