Dear Data Science Courses: Bye, Felicia!
New Year == New Goals. My first personal DS project is under way!
I’ve finally kicked off my training wheels, and I’m quitting cold turkey. No more courses and tutorials. I have gotten to the point of being annoyed at feeling as if I’ve learned a lot but can’t seem to confidently apply my newly self-taught programming skills. It’s a very common feeling, and common point to be stuck in, apparently. I’ve been reading and watching blogs and it seems like I’m in a place that most people tend to fall into.
For me, my journey into Data Science started at the beginning of The Pandemic where I had all the time in the world to watch tutorials and follow along. I’ve been all over Udemy, YouTube, and completed the IBM Data Science Certification courses. I’m so over all of it, and ready to do it all on my own.
The confidence in the process of doing data analysis, visualization, and science, is what I’m after. So, I hope you’ll follow along as I go on this journey, documenting along the way. I’m just at the beginning starting point of my project, and exploring my curiosities along the way.
STAGE 1: DATA COLLECTION
Since March 2021 I have been keeping all my receipts from my grocery visits. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them, but I knew that I was gathering data and it could be useful.
Now that we’ve come to the end of 2021, I thought about the inflation going on right now, so I wanted to take a look at those trends, and dive into the economics of the current times.
- Grocery information is being added to an Excel Sheet.
- Importing excel sheet into workbook.
(example below)
STAGE 2: HYPOTHESIS
I know for a fact that I did not care about prices as I planned my meals.
So I want to first see: “Did the items I buy go up in price?” and “By how much did they increase?” I think I’ll try and compare them to a national average, as well as when in the news inflation started to become factor.
Also The Pandemic has an effect, since I went on vacations, was out a little more in the summer… so all of that will probably be small factors and shifts in trends that I’ll want to look at.
STAGE 3: ANALYSIS
Here I go into the fun part! Using Python libraries to help. I’m also hoping that I can publish this into some kind of Dashboard. Maybe… Dash/Plotly? But otherwise, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish in my code right now:
1. Group items together and see how much I bought over the year
2. Display the prices over time to see if there are changes
3. See the category most purchased
Ok other than that, I’m not sure where else to go, but I know that I’ll uncover more trends, and be curious about more things. That’s the most exciting part to me right now: not knowing what else I can discover or be interested in.
Cheers!
-mw