Collecting the target variable

We need to determine whether or not a bank has failed in the past – this will be our target. This information is also available on the FDIC website at https://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html.

The website includes banks that have failed since October 2000, which covers all our dataset:

Let's see the steps to achieve this:

1. Download this information into a .csv file:

download.file("https://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.csv", "failed_banks.csv",method="auto", quiet=FALSE, mode = "wb", cacheOK = TRUE)

Even this list is updated periodically, as historical information does not change, but the results are still replicable. Anyway, the file used in the development is also available in the data repository of this book.

2. Now, upload the downloaded file into R, as follows...