some project ideas

Potential Project ideas

By week 3 you should have explored ideas on what could potentially be your course project. In case you're having a hard time finding inspiration, here are a few pointers and ideas of things to look into.

The most important thin, perhaps is that each team finds an project that would be enjoyable and useful. In other words, ask yourselves the following questions:

• is this something we're interested in working during the next couple of months?
• what is the insight that I can extract from this project/analysis?

A few examples:

Forecasting Elections

A few models have been developed to forecast elections in the US. One interesting project could be to test these models in contexts other than the US. If you're interested in forecasts based on surveys, then you could use some of these resources:

• The Supreme Electoral Court in Brazil, compiles all publicly available electoral polls. You can download them here for the 2016 election.
• The National Electoral Institute in Mexico also compiles all publicly available electoral polls. You can get the data for the last two presidential elections here

GDELT

GDELT is "the largest, most comprehensive, and highest resolution open database of human society ever created", per their own definition. The data is so rich that the sky is the limit. It even includes an R package to work with the database.

movies

IMDB has one of the most comprehensive movie databases. It has an API to get the data. Once downloaded, you could potentially engage in projects such as:

• forecasting movie revenue
• assessing the determinants of success of movies