Capstone Project

In this session you will work in pairs to explore a dataset using the skills you’ve learned in this series.

Workshop date: 2018-05-06

Author: Jon Pipitone, 2018

Learning objectives

  • Practice using your skills of:
    • Data organization and formulas in spreadsheets
    • Cleaning up messy data and exploring using OpenRefine
    • Data Wrangling and Visualisation in R

Tasks

In this session we’ll use a dataset of expenses from Yannay: Expenses-Budget2.xlsx

  1. Download it the data (perhaps using download.file()?)

  2. Get a feel for the data by opening it as a spreadsheet or using OpenRefine

  3. Come up with a few specific questions you have of the data, and decide how you will go about answering them using Spreadsheets/OpenRefine/R

Consider the following

  • Do you need edit the spreadsheet at all before you use it in OpenRefine? Why? That is, does this spreadsheet follow the best practices we discussed?
  • How do you know whether an entry is an expense or income?
  • Look at the columns for specifying the date… Will you need to make any changes? (ps. dates are complex. The lubridate package is great for managing dates in R)

Some questions to get you started

  • How much does Yannay spend per month?
  • Has that changed over the years?
  • What does he spend the most on every month beside tuition and rent?
  • How well can you predict his monthly spending on eating out based on everything else you know?