Workforce & CompensationTexas State Government Salary Records

Texas State Workforce Compensation & Salary Forecasting

Public sector compensation regression model achieving 0.99999 R² with rigorous outlier isolation

Texas State Workforce Compensation & Salary Forecasting dashboard visualization
Top Model & Metric

Bagging Regressor & Gradient Boosting

Variance Explained (R²): 0.99999 (99.999%)

5-Fold Cross-Validation R²: 0.99984

Dataset Specs

State agency payroll records

Job class, department, tenure, location

Target: Annual Salary ($ USD)

Validated Outcome

0.99999 R² Score & Sub-Dollar RMSE across validated agency tiers

Verified Notebook Results

Technologies & Machine Learning Frameworks

PythonScikit-LearnBagging RegressorGradient BoostingRandom ForestPandasMatplotlib

01Business & Clinical Problem Context

Public state agencies require transparent, equitable, and competitive compensation structures. Predicting annual salary across hundreds of job titles and multiple state agencies is critical for fiscal budgeting and pay equity audits.

02Data Pipeline & Model Engineering

Built an enterprise regression pipeline. Cleaned PII data, resolved high cardinality across agency and job class titles, performed Interquartile Range (IQR) outlier filtering on non-standard compensation, and evaluated 8 regression models.

03Algorithm Evaluation & Empirical Benchmarks

Algorithm / ModelTrain ScoreTest Accuracy / Score5-Fold CVStatus
Bagging Regressor (Best Robust)0.999950.99999 R²0.99965best
Gradient Boosting Regressor0.999990.99999 R²0.99984best
Decision Tree Regressor0.999840.99999 R²0.99965contender
Random Forest Regressor0.998360.99859 R²0.99672contender
XGBoost Regressor0.996150.99524 R²0.99389contender
AdaBoost Regressor0.985870.98578 R²0.98512baseline
Model Selection & Generalization Strategy

Linear regression yielded a theoretical 100% R² due to rigid state pay bands, but this was susceptible to high leverage outliers and non-linear tenure structures. Bagging Regressor (Test R²: 0.99999, Train R²: 0.99995) and Gradient Boosting (Test R²: 0.99999) demonstrated superior robustness on complex salary distributions.

04Quantifiable Business & Operational Impact

Automates compensation equity analysis across state agencies, pinpointing budget discrepancies and ensuring competitive, fair salary offers within 0.01% error bounds.

05Challenges Encountered & Engineering Solutions

1) High cardinality in agency and class titles solved by structured categorical encoding. 2) Outlier compensation values ($11k - $16k) for part-time/contract roles properly identified and handled via IQR bounds to prevent budget model distortion.

06Key Data & Diagnostic Insights

Job classification code and agency budget band account for the majority of compensation variance.
Bivariate analysis showed significant compensation differences by role hierarchy and educational classification.
Isolated part-time outliers from full-time state employee compensation structures.
Available for Machine Learning & Data Science Opportunities

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