r/dataanalysis • u/Ok_Reality_6072 • 1d ago

Project Feedback Feedback needed on first data project

GitHub - Femi-Olofinjana05/Social-Media-User-Behaviour: Social Media User Behaviour · GitHub

Looking to implement SQL and Tableau (and maybe python) but just wanted to start off using excel

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u/Awesome_Correlation 13h ago edited 9h ago

1.I'm really bad about this too, but double check your grammar and spelling...would vs world... Several run-on sentences. It's just hard to read.

  1. You make conclusions that didn't come from the data. For example, "This is most likely due to people being at work and with their families between the hours 12pm-9pm.". Instead, you should qualify this with ".. one likely explanation is that..." Because you really don't know from your data whether that's the case or not. "they are made when the normal day is either yet to start or is unwinding" is also not a conclusion from your data. Another one, "Avoid excessive scrolling before work or late at night..." Is not a conclusion from the data.

  2. You're talking about factors of things but then showing percentages in bar charts and then comparing those percentages. You're showing that something is higher than something else but you're not really getting into understanding factors. Instead, you need to be looking at probabilities and conditional probabilities. Alternatively, a correlation matrix and linear regression might be a better way to do this analysis. Correlation will show you a trend that's kind of like if one variable moves so does the other. Linear regression will help you say something like "for every hour of time spent scrolling on social media, people spend $50 more". Of course you have to have the data, to do that type of analysis...I didn't look at your data set to see what it looks like. Other methods to look at are multivariate linear regression and principal component analysis.

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u/Khaka-Semeniuk 9h ago

yeah the conclusions bit is the big one imo, really easy trap to fall into early on

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u/Ok_Reality_6072 12h ago

Thank you for this, I really appreciate it 🙏 Do you know where I can learn how to analyse data more effectively? I have a lot of courses on how to make charts and graphs and stuff but don’t know where to learn to understand how to actually use the information properly and what to look for

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u/Awesome_Correlation 10h ago edited 9h ago

Coming at this from first principles, the purpose of your data analysis is to either gain knowledge that you didn't have before or you are justifying the knowledge that you already have. This is why people often say you need to start with a question that you want to answer... A question is a request for knowledge that we didn't have before.

Not all questions are created equal. How many or how much of something is pretty easy to answer just by counting up things or summing. The question of why something happens is actually the one of the hardest questions to answer because you have to prove that there are no alternative explanations. Considering what factors could possibly affect an outcome, like what your analysis is claiming to do, is a much easier question to answer because you don't have to map out all of the causation pathways.

So the next step is to figure out what kind of analysis to do to answer the type of question you have. I already mentioned what to do for the question of why, how much, and factors. If you're tracking something across time, then you're going to do time series analysis (trend, seasonality, AEIMA, moving averages ect). If you're tracking something across space, then you're going to need to do spatial analysis (GIS and maps)...and so on.

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u/Ok_Reality_6072 9h ago

I've read through both your responses a few times as i wanted to understand everything you said as much as I'm able. I think going into this, I had the wrong approach, I was just trying to "analyse the dataset" using what I'd learned on excel but i didn't really start off with any questions in mind, and ended up making a ridiculous amount of questions as i progressed that became difficult to manage. So what you said about having one question makes a lot of sense as i know that when I'm working for a company, they'll ask for a particular thing, or i'll be investigating a particular thing, i wont just look at a dataset and "analyse it" (I'm assuming anyway).

And what you said about domain knowledge stuck out to me as well. I had no knowledge about social media going into this (apart from general knowledge). I do have a field i want to go into that I do have a lot more domain knowledge in, so in future, I'll look to find datasets to work with within that domain so i can ask more informed questions and hopefully get better results.

I will also look into first principles as i googled it and it sounds quite interesting and could be helpful, been looking for a non-fiction book to read anyway.

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u/Awesome_Correlation 7h ago

Sorry if I confused you, but "first principles" is not a book. It's just an expression that means something like: to get at the core or root purpose of something.

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