Signal 3 — Saving Animal’s Life with Data Analytics
Although keeping pets is popular in the U.S, approximately 1.5 million animals are euthanized in U.S. shelters because no one is adopting them and the shelter cannot afford them anymore.
To save animals’ lives, applying data science methods on the data from shelters can be a potential solution. In fact, animal shelter’s data may include much meaningful information, like numbers of intake, areas of abandoned animals and time of stay. All these data can be used to build models to predict target adopters, and then send customized information to attract these suitable adopters.
If we can build a system to collect and analyze data from animal shelters, both animals’ lives and people’s time can be saved significantly. Because lots of Americans are considering and willing to adopt a pet from shelters, and, simultaneously, thousands of pets are staying in shelters, especially most of them are healthy and young, an analytics system can connect the right animals with the adopters efficiently.
However, to really put data analytics into actions, we still face lots of problems. Because this field has not been noticed by data analysts, we need to find out how to call the society’s attention. Furthermore, the format of data from different shelters can vary significantly, so we may firstly consider how to standardize the data format.
Source:
http://www.jenunderwood.com/2016/07/26/making-a-difference-with-data-animal-shelters/
https://www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and-surrender/pet-statistics
