Deciding on a Capstone Project

Scott Biggs
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

With 12 weeks of class learning Monday thru Friday 9–5, not to mention after hours, it is coming to a close and a final project is needed to display all that I have learned. There are two subjects that interested me, wine quality and the impact weather has on it and crime related to the house pricing of the area. These intrigued me because both impact what I love. The first, is obvious, wine, the second may not be so obvious, my family and where we live.

In the pursuit of obtaining the necessary data for both projects I did run into some road blocks. One completely derailed my wine project. The fact that wineries add chemicals to keep the flavors of wine consistent. Knowing this I could no longer see the relevance of this project, at least not in the US, unless the winery itself made the wine in a completely organic fashion and never added chemicals to their wine to alter it. That being said it would be a great project for Spain or Italy where they make a lot of their wine the old fashion way with just grapes and natural fermentation.

The second idea of Crime being related to Property Value was instinctively the way to go. I have found some rich data sets for both, with crime data going back to 2009 and providing over 50,000 data points, after removing traffic crime. I was also able to find some decent real-estate data form the tax offices and apartment data with some light web scrapping. The next part of this is to analyze the data and start to clean it as needed.