Are you a beginner in Data Science? Are you looking out to advance your knowledge by getting some hands-on done on real-time projects? Are you looking for some high-valued project ideas to build your portfolio? Or, do you simply want to win a job by impressing your recruiter by building a kickass resume? Well, you have arrived at the right place as this article is a one-stop solution for you.
Data is the new oil. Data science has been coined as the “sexiest” job of the 21st century by the prestigious Harvard University. Almost every other business or industry is starting to rely on data to make data-backed decisions. It is for this reason that data-based jobs have skyrocketed. According to a report produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Data science skills will drive the overall employment rate by a whopping 27.9 % till 2026.
From the above report, it is evident that Data science skill is going to be in-demand for a fairly long time. In order to stand out from the crowd of Data science aspirants, you need to be both fundamentally and practically sound with the skillset. Well, the fundamental part can be covered by studying various online resources. To get practically comfortable with the topic, you will need to perform hands-on projects. This is exactly why this article is of immense use for you.
There are many wins of doing Data science projects. You can include them in your portfolio and start freelancing in Data science. You can include them in your GitHub, LinkedIn, Resume, and literally everywhere as your achievement. Above all, you will learn a lot. Almost every Data science project presents an ample amount of learning opportunity. The presented challenges will force you to explore more about the covered topic and thus enable you to build a deeper understanding.
I am sure you are convinced about the importance of data science projects in order to become a good Data Scientist. You are all ready to dive into the project ideas. For the sake of simplicity, I have divided the project ideas based on your level of expertise, i.e. beginner level, intermediate level, and advanced level.
Beginner Project – Impact of Climate Change on Supply of Food Globally
Climate conditions throb a direct impact on our environment. Severe climatic conditions not only impact human lives and the lives of other beings, it drastically impacts the entire food production as well. Thus, you can leverage your Data Science skill to produce a solution to this problem by building actionable intelligence over data.
You can use Data Visualization to build a dashboard that tracks several key factors in real-time. The main aim of this dashboard would be to study the potentially harmful impacts of climate on the crop. It should monitor factors such as the performance of food production centers, the amount of carbon dioxide being produced by the plants, etc. Above all, you can provide actionable recommendations to the farmers using which they can benefit from your project.
If you’re interested in doing this project, the following resources on Kaggle will help you.
Intermediate Project – Gender and Age Detection
Is there any one project which is absolutely sure to fetch the attention of almost all recruiters? Yes, it exists. This is exactly the project which we are discussing here. It is immensely impressive to have it on your resume and is also very interesting to work with. This project is a real-time application of computer vision.
The agenda of this project is to predict the gender of an individual as “male” or “female” based on their images. Also, to predict their ages which generally is produced in the bracketed range – 0-2/ 4-6/ 8- 2/ 15-20/ 25-32/ 38-43/ 48-53/ 60-100.
You will work with multiple file extensions such as .pb, .prototxt, .pbtxt etc. You will encounter several challenges such as dim lights, makeup, distorted images, etc., for which you will need to find the way forwards. It is also a possibility that you will need to combine multiple data sources in order to overcome the presented challenges. Thus, overall, you will love to work on this project.
If you’re interested in this data science project, check out this Kaggle notebook for reference.
Advanced Project – Customer Segmentation
Customer is the key to almost all organizations today due to cutthroat competition in the market. It is due to this reason that Digital Marketing is at its boom. The end objective to seek digital marketers is to identify the correct set of customers before designing a campaign or a marketing plan. This is where “customer segmentation” becomes critical. After determining the potential customer base, the customers can further be sub-divided based on gender, age, interest, buying behavior, etc.
This project is a classic application of unsupervised learning under machine learning algorithms. There are various approaches to perform segmentation under the headspace of unsupervised learning, However, K-Means clustering stands out of all. This project can be applied under almost all critical business use-cases such as marketing, campaigns, etc.
If you’re interested in doing this data science project, check out this Kaggle notebook.
Final Thoughts
Data Science is huge. It has various headspace as Data Visualization, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Time Series Modelling, etc. Thus, it is quite inevitable for a beginner to feel lost in the process of becoming a good Data Scientist.
According to me, for now, the correct approach is to first study the fundamentals. Once you are acquainted with the basics, make a project over the topic to apply it in real-time and only then move ahead with the next topic. If you follow this, you are going to be unstoppable.
So, go ahead and start working on your next data science project.
