Gotta Sort 'Em All: Applying Machine Learning Algorithms to Pokémon

Since its inception in Japan in 1996, Pokémon has become the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. Spanning trading cards, video and mobile phone games, television and film series, music, books, manga comics, merchandise, and even two temporary theme parks, Pokémon is an international cultural phenomenon. Chatrooms, subreddits, and other communication forums exist across the internet for the explicit purpose of Pokémon-centric discussions - including comparisons of the features of various Pokémon (e.g. Herein lies an excellent opportunity for applying both classification and regression machine learning algorithms to an especially fun dataset: the species of the Pokémon universe. Two features are given regarding the name of each species: the base form and the evolved form (if applicable, otherwise the evolved name value is empty).