In the last year NSS Data Science and Data Analytics students have benefitted greatly from the generosity of Genesco, Alliance Bernstein, Healthcare Bluebook, The General Insurance, Big G Express, Vanderbilt’s Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE), Metro Nashville Planning, Public Works, and Information Technology Departments, and the State of TN Department of Education. People from these organizations all shared datasets, their expertise, and questions for analysis with four different cohorts.

The questions covered many areas. Descriptive analytics questions included work to determine where scooters are being used most and where they are sitting for days on end and work to analyze requests submitted to hubNashville, including what parts of town are submitting the largest number of COVID-19 requests. Diagnostic analytics projects ranged from work to understand the reasons that profits change at stores year to year for the same fiscal week to who/what accounts are most efficiently utilizing their resources for running computing jobs. The machine learning project for the third Data Science cohort modeled a variety of engine diagnostic codes and their timings to predict a full engine derate in tractor trailers. And the natural language processing project aimed to extract key features from 424B filings pulled from the Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval (EDGAR) system).

Being able to work on these projects gives our students the experience of working with real (messy) data, fuels their ability to talk about how they have worked through different issues and challenges in project work, and provides what essentially amounts to a practicum experience alongside their learning.

As we prepare for two Data Analytics bootcamps this summer and fall and another Data Science bootcamp beginning in September we are looking for people/companies to share data and analysis questions. If you want to help shape tomorrow’s data scientists and data analysts by sharing a dataset, your expertise, and a question for analysis I’d love to hear from you.

To get involved, please email Mary van Valkenburg.