Assignment - Programming for Data Analysts (PDA)

Brief - learning outcomes

This assessment is designed to gauge your understanding, skills and application of common data analysis techniques used in business and other organisations today. As such you need to demonstrate your attainment in these areas according to the THREE Module Learning Outcomes(LOs):

LO 1 - Critically evaluate the principles of programming and apply them in a business context

LO 2 - Critically evaluate the use of code libraries in programming for a business context

LO 3 - Construct a programming solution to solve a defined business problem

Tasks - This assessment is made up of TWO Parts

Part 1 - a coding exercise in data analysis using Python notebook

Part 2 - writing a business report

Scenario - Zappy Financial Services (ZFS) is a local company that provides small business loans. Last year, loan applications increased by over 200%, largely because of a concerted online campaign to establish a strong digital presence. Almost all loan applications and business leads are generated from search engines and digital advertisements, reflecting the decision to increase advertising spend on SEO channels such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and similar platforms.

Despite a strong digital marketing approach, the current loan application process remains manual. It requires the online completion of information, including gender, marital status, number of dependents, education, income etc. To date, several of these factors have been considered in the approval decision. All applications are reviewed and approved by the loan team which, given the recent increase in volumes, has resulted in skills shortages, longer loan approval times and increased potential operational and control risk. The current operating model constrains further growth. Loan decisions are categorised as either "approved" or "rejected."

You are employed by ZFS as a lead programmer, and have coding and data analytics knowledge, as well as a deep appreciation for the need to balance business growth with a robust control environment. You will be leading this project and have been tasked with providing a scalable solution - that addresses key resourcing and control risks.

Specifically, the Board has instructed you to develop several partial automation processes that will help the existing loans team, freeing up their time for greater one-on-one customer contact. You need to provide a data-driven solution while working with a variety of key stakeholders each with varying objectives such as marketing, internal audit and compliance.

An in-house database administrator (DBA) was able to compile a PDF of past applications which the loans team are hoping to map to previous loan approval outcomes.

The two files provided by the DBA are:

-A file in PDF format called 'Loans_Database_Table.pdf'

-An Excel file called 'Zappy Loan Data.xlsx'

The first file has been extracted from business loan records from the previous year, and it includes a status field for each application, allowing the business to map inputs to outcomes for a possible supervised machine learning exercise.

The Excel file is maintained by the Sales team, and it is currently being saved in a shared folder. This increases the chance of duplication and missing values.

You will need to reflect the learnings throughout this module and consider the learning outcomes particularly LO 3: Construct a programming solution to solve a defined business problem as you create your answer.

Part 1 - Construct a Programming Solution

In Part 1, you will deliver an Interactive Python Notebook (a . Ipynb file) with the code used, with comments, to explain the scripts, the libraries used, and the logic. All such commentary should be written using the built-in markup language (Markdown text).

The notebook which you create should highlight some of the key findings which you have in the data and the insights which you can provide to the business. The tasks which need to be completed in the Python Notebook include the following:

Task 1: Loan Data Automation

Create a new .ipynb notebook within Google Colab and load the TWO data files provided by the DBA. Extract the two datasets from these two files which contains information about past loan records. The numeric values stored in each column of the loan dataset are:

-Gender: 1-Male, 2-Female

-Married: 0-Single, 1-Married

-Dependents: 0, 1, 2, 3+

-Graduate: 0-No, 1-Yes

-Self-Employed: 0-No, 1-Yes

-Credit_History: 0-No, 1-Yes

-Property_Area: 1-Urban, 2-Semiurban, 3-Rural

You should use Python to load the information contained within these datasets into memory. You should also add comments to your notebook, explaining the steps taken to load the data, how you treated the PDF and Excel data, the libraries called and the overall procedure. Recall this will be used for training colleagues in future.

Task 2 - Descriptive analysis

First, check the datasets and make sure the data that comes from these two files is valid. Ensure your loan data is correctly indexed on the Loan_ID column.

Then, clean the loan data. Provide an explanation of the steps taken to ensure data preparation for analysis such as the correction of duplicates, missing values, outliers etc.

Then, carry out Descriptive analysis on current loan data. Your notebook file should contain some basic Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) of the data.

This should include items such as:

-The percentage of female applicants that had their loan approved

-The average income of all applicants

-The average income of all applicants that are self-employed

-The average income of all applicants that are not self-employed

-The average income of all graduate applicants

-The percentage of graduate applicants that had their loan status approved

This code should then be copied and pasted as Appendix 1 in your Part 2 report.

Part 2 - Report - Business Case

Using the scenario given in Part 1 develop a business case, setting out WHY a programming solution involving data analysis is needed and HOW you are going to carry out your analysis. The format of the report should include:

a) Introduction: This should cover the current business environment of companies like ZFS, the problems your solution would address, and what impact and benefits your proposed programming solution might have on the business. You should also mention the implications of not doing anything, and the kind of human resources needed. Financial information or resources are NOT required.

b) Approach: Describe the approach you would take to implement your solution. i.e., the language, software and tools to be used, explaining the reasons for their choice. Also, describe the steps required in preparing the data and how visualisation will be used. You should provide a critical discussion on the role of code libraries and include a brief discussion of the need for design and test of any written code.

c) Recommendations for future work: This should show the proposed route forward including an outline plan. Briefly explain how using the data provided, your solution could be further developed to build a predictive model. A model that can be trained to predict if a new loan application is likely to be approved or rejected. Your recommendation should include a short explanation of the techniques, libraries, tools, and objective function used to evaluate the precision of your recommended predictive model.

d) Conclusions: A brief conclusion summarising the main points in the report.

e) Appendix - Code: Copy and paste the contents of your programming notebook as Appendix 1. This does not contribute towards your word count.

f) (Further appendices, to support your report): Again, these do not count towards your word count.

In writing your report, use the insight and knowledge provided in this module but also leverage sound academic research to support your report.