Project 1: Choose your own adventure

Here are a list of possible projects to try out:

• Predicting churn in the NYC civil servants. Replacing people is costly and atypical departures could signal issues in management.
  • Using the payroll from different years, we can infer who has left the NYC payroll.
  • Does the budget help us predict this?
  • Does the census help us predict this?
• Tariffs are coming. Predicting import/export alternatives for different products or different countries can be useful.
  • The monthly changes in import/exports can be found here
• Housing prices is a major concern for young people.
  • Does the census contains information on spending on housing over the years
  • Social vulnerability talks about how different neighborhoods face different risk factors.
• Data mining on menus. NY Public Library has a What’s on the menu? Project and its data, digitized versions of the menus, is posted here
  • Do we see the different cuisines/cultures from simply parsing menus?
  • Can we predict changes in menus?
  • Can we predict population changes from the menus? (This might require some old demographic data that’s beyond the American Community Survey)
• Mining geospatial datasets listed here
  • E.g. predicting forest loss or its impact, e.g. CO2 maps from Planet Lab (application required!)
• You can make this a trial run for your final project as well.