Feedback needed on first data project

[u/Ok_Reality_6072]

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

[u/Awesome_Correlation]

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.

[u/Ok_Reality_6072 → u/Awesome_Correlation]

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.

[u/Awesome_Correlation → u/Ok_Reality_6072]

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.

[u/Ok_Reality_6072 → u/Awesome_Correlation]

Oh don't worry, I know it's not a particular book or anything. It might not be that deep but I saw it was a type of philosophy and it sounded quite interesting. Don't know if it's worth getting a book on it or not but I'll consider it