Want to learn how to do data science over the holidays? Once you know the basics (consider my intro to programming textbook using R or video series on the topic), it’s important to START a project! Here are a few holiday-themed ideas to get you started:
- Most popular Christmas songs: Analyze streaming data to find the most listened-to Christmas songs over time, by region, or even by generation. You could even build a model to predict the next Christmas hit!
- Gift-giving trends: Use e-commerce data to explore what people are buying the most for Christmas gifts. Analyze trends by age, gender, location, or price range. You could even predict the most popular gifts of the year.
- Santa’s logistics: Use geographic data and airspeed calculations to estimate how Santa could possibly deliver all those presents in one night. Consider factors like time zones, weather conditions, and reindeer power!
- Evolution of Christmas movies: Analyze movie ratings and release dates to see how Christmas movie trends have changed over time. You could even identify the most popular tropes or predict the next Christmas movie hit.
- Visualize Christmas tree ornaments: Use image recognition to categorize types of Christmas tree ornaments, or build a tool that suggests ornament pairings based on color and style.
- Identify charitable giving trends: Analyze donation data to see how people’s giving habits change around the holidays. You could explore which causes are most popular or how much is donated overall. Further, you could try to replicate other reports from other analyses and try to explain any similarities/differences you observe.
Now that your creative gears are jingling, it’s your turn to take the reins! If you need some help getting started with model building consider my intro to machine and statistical learning video series. Now – let’s build a collaborative Christmas data empire, one snowglobe-shaped insight at a time! Don’t be shy, data elves – the world needs your festive analytics magic!
Note: Bard was used to help write this article. Midjourney was used to help create the images presented in this article.