Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Predicting Service Allocation

An idle mind is a devil's workshop they say. An excited mind is a scientist's workshop in that case. Not that scientists aren't devils, but you get the drift, don't you?
So anyhow, as the 1000 of us 1122 who've cleared this year's Civil Services Examination eagerly await our respective service allocations (the top 122 or so can rest assured they'll get whatever they want), I thought of extending my work to predict this.

Presenting cowmaaa's Predictive Analytics for Service Allocation 
  • Approach 1 -
    This is the raw approach where I simply mapped data from 2009-2012 with the last rank in the General category (without any disabilities) for each respective service. Plotted a Polynomial Regression trendline in Excel and here's the graph -
    Last Rank for Service Vs Year of Service Allocation



    According to this graph, the last ranks in General category for the following Services would be as follows -
    • IAS - 138
    • IFS -92
    • IPS - 300
    • IRS (IT) - 510
    • IRS (C&CE) - 660

    However, one fundamental, if not obvious, flaw with this approach is that though there are more vacancies this year compared to any of the previous years, the increase is purely from the Group A & Group B Services - with IAS (94 in 2012 to 90 in 2013), IFS (16 to 17) & IPS (75 to 75) pretty much remaining stagnant compared to last year.
    So then I figured this would not be accurate.
     
  • Approach 2 -
    This improved approach entails plotting the last rank for each of the Services over the years (i.e. 2009-2012) against the number of General vacancies for that particular service that year. This way, the trendline would indicate last rank strictly based on the number of vacancies only and not the year.

    Accordingly, this is the graph -

    Last Rank for Service Vs No of Vacancies for Service
    This graph gives a much more realistic view of things. Last predicted ranks for IAS, IFS & IPS pretty much remain the same, given the vacancies are also the same, while those for the 2 IRS's can be expected to increase understandably, by a reasonable amount. Here's the predicted list of final ranks for the different services based on Linear Regression from the graph above -
    • IAS - 102
    • IFS - 140
    • IPS - 285
    • IRS (IT) - 380
    • IRS (C&CE) - 580
Source:
Let's see how close I am to what eventually transpires. :-D

Service Predicted Last Rank Actual Last Rank
IAS 102 92
IFS 140 141
IPS 285 249
IRS (IT) 380 369
IRS (C&CE) 580 541
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