Classify Nationalities with Machine Learning

In this article, I will take you through how we can classify the nationalities of people by using their names. You will be thinking about how we can classify nationalities by using just names. There is a lot about how we can play with names.

Classify Nationalities

Let’s get started with this machine learning task to classify nationalities by importing the necessary packages. I will classify nationalities based on names as Indian or Non-Indian. So, let’s import some packages and get started with the task:

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from tensorflow import keras
import tensorflow as tf
import pandas as pd
import os
import reCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Now, let’s import the datasets. The datasets I am using here in this article can be easily downloaded from here. Now after importing the datasets I will prepare two helper functions for data cleaning and data processing:

male_data = pd.read_csv(male.csv)
female_data = pd.read_csv(femaile.csv)

After loading and removing the wrong entries in the data, we got a few records around 13,000.

For non-Indian names, there is a nifty package called Faker. This generates names from different regions:

from faker import Faker
fake = Faker(‘en_US’)
fake.name()Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

‘Brian Evans’

We have generated approximately the same number of names as we have in the Indian data set. We then removed samples longer than 5 words. The Indian data set contained a lot of names with just first names. So we need to make the overall non-Indian distribution also similar.

non_indian_data.head()Code language: CSS (css)

	name	count_words
0	sara gulbrandsen	2
1	kathryn villarreal	2
2	jennifer mccormick	2
3	james eaton	2
4	melissa bond	2

We end up with about 14,000 non-Indian names and 13,000 Indian names. Now let’s build a neural network to classify nationalities using names:

	names	predictions_lstm_char
0	lalitha	indian
1	tyson	non_indian
2	shailaja	indian
3	shyamala	indian
4	vishwanathan	indian
5	ramanujam	indian
6	conan	non_indian
7	kryslovsky	non_indian
8	ratnani	indian
9	diego	non_indian
10	kakoli	indian
11	shreyas	indian
12	brayden	non_indian
13	shanon	non_indian

So this is how we can easily classify nationalities with machine learning. I did not include the full code and exploration here, you can have a look at the full code from here. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.

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