4 Data Science Projects That We Can’t Get Enough Of

Posted by Michael on June 22, 2017

LI3Y5U376X At The Data Incubator we run a free advanced 8-week fellowship for PhDs looking to enter the industry as data scientists.

As part of the application process, we ask potential fellows to propose and begin working on a data science project to highlight their skills to employers. Regardless of whether you’re selected to be a fellow, this project will be instrumental in attracting employer interest and highlighting your skills. Here are some projects that we would love to see, and that we hope to see you take on as well.

Multi-Axial Political Analysis

We often think of American politics in terms of a single axis: left versus right, democrat versus republican. In reality, the parties are composed of varying factions with different identities and political priorities and American politics is actually broken along multiple axes: foreign policy, social issues, regulation, social spending, education, second amendment, just to name a few. Continue reading →

JUST Capital and The Data Incubator Challenge

Posted by Michael on April 14, 2017

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re teaming up with JUST Capital to help crowd-source data science for social good. The Data Incubator offers a free eight-week data science fellowship for those with a PhD or a masters degree looking to transition into data science. As a part of the application process, students are asked to submit a data science capstone project and the best students are invited to work on them during the fellowship. JUST Capital is helping providing data and project prompts to harness the collective brainpower amongst The Data Incubator fellows to solve these high-impact social problems.

These projects focus on applied data science techniques with tangible impacts on JUST Capital’s mission.
The projects are open ended and creativity is encouraged. The documents provided, below, are suitable for analysis, but one should not shy in seeking out additional sources of data.

JUST Capital is a nonprofit that provides information and rankings on how large corporations perform on issues that matter most to the public. We give individuals a voice on what really matters to them, and evaluate how companies perform on those issues. By providing the right knowledge and making it easy to access and understand, we believe capital will flow to corporations that are more JUST, ultimately leading to a balanced business world that takes into account human needs that are so often neglected today. The meaning of JUST is defined by the American public as fair, equitable and balanced. In 2016, JUST Capital surveyed nearly 4,000 Americans from all regions and walks of life, in its second annual Poll on Corporate America. The issues identified by the public form the basis of our benchmark — it is against these Drivers and Components that we measure corporate performance. The most important factors broadly relate to employees, customers, company leadership, the environment, communities and investors.

Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects Part 6

Posted by Michael on November 9, 2016

startup-593324_960_720 Links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are a few cool public data sources you can use for your next project:

Continue reading →

Data Science Project Ideas

Posted by Michael on October 26, 2016

We love data science and cool data science projects. If you’re a applying for our free data science fellowship and looking to propose a data science project, here are four project ideas.

GitHub

GitHub is a great source of data on how engineers write code. A recent post found discrimination against Pull Requests submitted by women on GitHub, although perhaps that study could have been better. But there are lots of other ideas to pursue. We can easily learn an n-gram classifier on whether a line of code is a comment or not and search for commented out code. Are repos by academics more likely to have commented out code? Are they more likely to violate lint rules? Additionally, it would be interesting to analyze commits that are in response to bug fixes to predict in which lines of code bugs are more likely to occur.

Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects: Part 5

Posted by Michael on October 21, 2016

computer-1185626_960_720 Links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are some more cool public data sources you can use for your next project:

Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects: Part 4

Posted by Michael on October 13, 2016

student-849825_960_720 Links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are some more cool public data sources you can use for your next project: Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects: Part 3

Posted by Michael on October 5, 2016

student-849822_960_720 Links to Part 1, Part 2

At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are some more cool public data sources you can use for your next project: Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects: Part 2

Posted by Michael on October 17, 2014

startup-849804_960_720 Link to Part 1

At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are some more cool public data sources you can use for your next project: Continue reading →

Data Sources for Cool Data Science Projects: Part 1

Posted by Michael on October 16, 2014

startup-594127_960_720 At The Data Incubator, we run a free eight week data science fellowship to help our Fellows land industry jobs. Our hiring partners love considering Fellows who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with data. That’s why our Fellows work on cool capstone projects that showcase those skills. One of the biggest obstacles to successful projects has been getting access to interesting data. Here are a few cool public data sources you can use for your next project: Continue reading →