Data wrangling (or data munging) is the process of cleaning, transforming, and preparing raw data for analysis. Here are some project ideas that focus on different aspects of data wrangling:
1. Social Media Sentiment Analysis
- Description: Gather tweets or posts from social media platforms about a specific topic (e.g., a product, event, or hashtag).
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Clean the text data (remove URLs, special characters, and stop words).
- Process the data to extract features (like hashtags, mentions).
- Normalize the text (lowercase, stemming).
- Create a structured dataset with timing, sentiment scores, etc.
2. Healthcare Data Cleaning
- Description: Use publicly available healthcare datasets, like patient records or hospital readmission rates.
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Handle missing values in critical fields.
- Verify and normalize data types (e.g., date formats).
- Aggregate data at different levels (e.g., by region, age group).
- Combine datasets from multiple sources into a single cohesive dataset.
3. IoT Sensor Data Processing
- Description: Collect data from IoT devices (like temperature sensors, smart home devices).
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Filter out outliers and erroneous readings.
- Resample or interpolate data to fill in gaps.
- Create time-series features for analysis (e.g., rolling averages).
- Merge multiple devices' data for comparative analysis.
4. Web Scraping and Data Cleaning
- Description: Scrape data from a website (like e-commerce product listings).
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Use regex to extract relevant information (e.g., prices, product names).
- Clean and standardize the product categories.
- Create unique identifiers for products.
- Manage duplicate entries and consolidate data.
5. Financial Transaction Data Analysis
- Description: Gather transaction data from sources like banking or stock trading APIs.
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Clean up transaction descriptions and normalize them into categories.
- Handle discrepancies in date formats.
- Filter out erroneous transactions (like duplicates).
- Create summary statistics (monthly spending, top categories).
6. Text Data Processing for NLP
- Description: Collect a corpus of text for natural language processing, like articles, blogs, or books.
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Tokenize the text into individual words or phrases.
- Remove stop words and perform stemming/lemmatization.
- Create a term-document matrix for analysis.
- Annotate the dataset for sentiment or topic modeling.
7. Retail Sales Data Preparation
- Description: Use a dataset from a retail store (like transactions, inventory, or customer data).
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Merge customer and transaction data.
- Create new features (e.g., days since last purchase).
- Handle missing values and duplicates.
- Create time-based aggregations for sales trends.
8. Sports Analytics
- Description: Gather sports statistics (player performance, match results) from various sources.
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Normalize player names and team names.
- Merge datasets from different sports or leagues.
- Calculate performance metrics and averages.
- Visualize the data to identify trends over time.
9. Public Transportation Data Analysis
- Description: Analyze public transportation data (bus routes, arrival times).
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Clean time-related data for consistency.
- Remove redundant route information.
- Aggregate data by time of day, day of the week.
- Combine spatial data with schedules for analysis of delays.
10. Survey Data Cleanup
- Description: Clean and analyze survey data collected from various respondents.
- Wrangling Tasks:
- Assess and address missing or inconsistent responses.
- Normalize rating scales (e.g., different scales for the same question).
- Create demographic groupings for analysis.
- Visualize distributions and key insights.
Each of these projects can teach you different data wrangling techniques and tools, such as Python libraries (e.g., Pandas, NumPy), R, SQL for data manipulation, or visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Matplotlib, Seaborn) for exploring the cleaned data.