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Consumer Complaints

Table of Contents

  1. Problem
  2. Steps to submit your solution
  3. Input Dataset
  4. Expected output
  5. Instructions
  6. Tips on getting an interview
  7. Repo directory structure
  8. Testing your code
  9. Questions?

Problem

The federal government provides a way for consumers to file complaints against companies regarding different financial products, such as payment problems with a credit card or debt collection tactics. This challenge will be about identifying the number of complaints filed and how they're spread across different companies.

**For this challenge, we want to know for each financial product and year, the total number of complaints, number of companies receiving a complaint, and the highest percentage of complaints directed at a single company.

Steps to submit your solution

  • To submit your entry, use the link you received in your coding challenge invite email
  • Do NOT attach a file - we will not accept solutions with attached files
  • Do NOT send your solution over an email - We are unable to accept coding challenges that way
  • To see whether your code will pass at least one key test on our system (do this prior to submission), use this page: https://insight-cc-submission.com/test-my-repo-link and choose 'Consumer Complaints' in the challenge dropdown

Creating private repositories

To avoid plagiarism and wrongdoing, we request you submit a private repository of your code, and then invite us to collaborate prior to submitting your solution. Both GitHub and Bitbucket offer free private repositories at no extra cost.

Submitting a link to your repository

  • Provide a link to the specific repo for this project, not your general profile
  • Exactly follow the directory structure detailed in this Readme, especially providing a 'run.sh' shell script that executes your code
  • Put any comments in the README file of your project repo

Input dataset

For this challenge, when we grade your submission, an input file, complaints.csv, will be moved to the top-most input directory of your repository. Your code must read that input file, process it and write the results to an output file, report.csv that your code must place in the top-most output directory of your repository.

Below are the contents of an example complaints.csv file:

Date received,Product,Sub-product,Issue,Sub-issue,Consumer complaint narrative,Company public response,Company,State,ZIP code,Tags,Consumer consent provided?,Submitted via,Date sent to company,Company response to consumer,Timely response?,Consumer disputed?,Complaint ID
2019-09-24,Debt collection,I do not know,Attempts to collect debt not owed,Debt is not yours,"transworld systems inc. is trying to collect a debt that is not mine, not owed and is inaccurate.",,TRANSWORLD SYSTEMS INC,FL,335XX,,Consent provided,Web,2019-09-24,Closed with explanation,Yes,N/A,3384392
2019-09-19,"Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",Credit reporting,Incorrect information on your report,Information belongs to someone else,,Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response,Experian Information Solutions Inc.,PA,15206,,Consent not provided,Web,2019-09-20,Closed with non-monetary relief,Yes,N/A,3379500
2020-01-06,"Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",Credit reporting,Incorrect information on your report,Information belongs to someone else,,,Experian Information Solutions Inc.,CA,92532,,N/A,Email,2020-01-06,In progress,Yes,N/A,3486776
2019-10-24,"Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",Credit reporting,Incorrect information on your report,Information belongs to someone else,,Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response,"TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS, INC.",CA,925XX,,Other,Web,2019-10-24,Closed with explanation,Yes,N/A,3416481
2019-11-20,"Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",Credit reporting,Incorrect information on your report,Account information incorrect,I would like the credit bureau to correct my XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX balance. My correct balance is XXXX,Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response,"TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS, INC.",TX,77004,,Consent provided,Web,2019-11-20,Closed with explanation,Yes,N/A,3444592

Each line of the input file, except for the first-line header, represents one complaint. Consult the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's technical documentation for a description of each field.

  • Notice that complaints were not listed in chronological order
  • In 2019, there was a complaint against TRANSWORLD SYSTEMS INC for Debt collection
  • Also in 2019, Experian Information Solutions Inc. received one complaint for Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports while TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS, INC. received two
  • In 2020, Experian Information Solutions Inc. received a complaint for Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports

In summary that means

  • In 2019, there was one complaint for Debt collection, and 100% of it went to one company
  • Also in 2019, three complaints against two companies were received for Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports and 2/3rd of them (or 67% if we rounded the percentage to the nearest whole number) were against one company (TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS, INC.)
  • In 2020, only one complaint was received for Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports, and so the highest percentage received by one company would be 100%

For this challenge, we want for each product and year that complaints were received, the total number of complaints, number of companies receiving a complaint and the highest percentage of complaints directed at a single company.

For the purposes of this challenge, all names, including company and product, should be treated as case insensitive. For example, "Acme", "ACME", and "acme" would represent the same company.

Expected output

After reading and processing the input file, your code should create an output file, report.csv, with as many lines as unique pairs of product and year (of Date received) in the input file.

Each line in the output file should list the following fields in the following order:

  • product (name should be written in all lowercase)
  • year
  • total number of complaints received for that product and year
  • total number of companies receiving at least one complaint for that product and year
  • highest percentage (rounded to the nearest whole number) of total complaints filed against one company for that product and year. Use standard rounding conventions (i.e., Any percentage between 0.5% and 1%, inclusive, should round to 1% and anything less than 0.5% should round to 0%)

The lines in the output file should be sorted by product (alphabetically) and year (ascending)

Given the above complaints.csv input file, we'd expect an output file, report.csv, in the following format

"credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",2019,3,2,67
"credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports",2020,1,1,100
debt collection,2019,1,1,100

Notice that because debt collection was only listed for 2019 and not 2020, the output file only has a single entry for debt collection. Also, notice that when a product has a comma (,) in the name, the name should be enclosed by double quotation marks ("). Finally, notice that percentages are listed as numbers and do not have % in them.

Instructions

We designed this coding challenge to assess your coding skills, your understanding of computer science fundamentals and ability to program in a Linux environment. They are both prerequisites of becoming a data engineer. To solve this challenge you might pick a programing language of your choice (preferably Python, Scala, Java, or C/C++ because they are commonly used and will help us better assess you), but you are only allowed to use the default data structures that come with that programming language (you might use I/O libraries). For example, you can code in Python, but you should not use Pandas or any other external libraries (i.e., don't use Python modules that must be installed using 'pip').

The objective here is to see if you can implement the solution using basic data structure building blocks and software engineering best practices (by writing clean, modular, and well-tested code).

Tips on getting an interview

As a data engineer, it’s important that you write clean, well-documented code that scales for a large amount of data. For this reason, it’s important to ensure that your solution works well for a large number of records, rather than just the above example.

Here you can find a zipped, modest-sized dataset to test your code (see here for more information on the data dictionary).

Note, we will use this data to test the full functionality of your code, along with other test cases.

It's important to use software engineering best practices like unit tests, especially because data is not always clean and predictable.

Before submitting your solution you should summarize your approach and run instructions (if any) in your README.

You may write your solution in any mainstream programming language, such as C, C++, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, or Scala. Once completed, submit a link of your Github or Bitbucket repo with your source code.

In addition to the source code, the top-most directory of your repo must include the input and output directories, and a shell script named run.sh that compiles and runs the program(s) that implement(s) the required features.

See the figure below for the required structure of the top-most directory in your repo, or simply clone this repo.

Repo directory structure

The top-level directory structure for your repo should look like the following: (So that we can grade your submission, replicate this directory structure at the top-most level of your project repository. Do not place the structure in a subdirectory)

├── README.md
├── run.sh
├── src
│   └── consumer_complaints.py
├── input
│   └── complaints.csv
├── output
|   └── report.csv
├── insight_testsuite
    └── tests
        └── test_1
        |   ├── input
        |   │   └── complaints.csv
        |   |__ output
        |   │   └── report.csv
        ├── your-own-test_1
            ├── input
            │   └── complaints.csv
            |── output
                └── report.csv

Don't fork this repo and don't use this README instead of your own. The content of src does not need to be a single file called consumer_complaints.py, which is only an example. Instead, you should include your own source files and give them expressive names.

Testing your code

As an engineer, you'll want to make sure you are thoroughly testing your code. Use the insight_testsuite directory to showcase the tests you conducted on your code. Under that directory, create a separate folder for each test. Each test directory should also have a separate input subdirectory containing the complaint.csv input file you want to test, and an output subdirectory containing the expected report.csv output for that test.

We've included one test (test_1), which contains the sample input and output files detailed in this Readme. To test your code, you can manually move each input test file into the top-level input directory, then run your program and compare the output with the expected output. Or you can write a script to do this automatically, but note we are not requiring you to write a test script.

We do ask that you test your code using the web page mentioned earlier to ensure your code can run in the Linux environment that we will review your code. The test page will check to see if your code passes test_1. If there are errors or if the results don't match what is expected, you should debug your code's behavior by yourself. If you receive system errors that you do not believe are due to your code, you can email cc@insightdataengineering.com for help.

If your code must be compiled to run (e.g., javac, make), that compilation (as well as the execution) of your code must be specified in the run.sh script of your code repository.

For Python programmers, you can use Python 2 or Python 3. If you use the former, specify python in your run.sh script, or if you use the later, specify python3, which defaults to Python 3.5.2. Other options that could be use are python3.7 or python3.8.

Questions?

Email us at cc@insightdataengineering.com