12 Cool Data Science

Projects Ideas for Beginners

and Experts
“How many data science projects have you completed so far?”

Claire D. Costa

Sep 19, 2020·11 min read

Photo by bongkarn thanyakij from Pexels

The domain of Data Science brings with itself a

variety of scientific tools, processes, algorithms,
and knowledge extraction systems from structured
and unstructured data alike, for identifying
meaningful patterns in it.

Data Science has been on a boom for the last couple of years,

and the push in the domain of Artificial Intelligence due to
the various innovations is only going to take it further on to the
next level. As more industries begin to realize the power of
Data Science, more opportunities surface in the market.

If you fancy Data Science and are eager to get a solid grip on the
technology, now is as a good time as ever to hone your
skills to comprehend and manage the upcoming challenges in
Data Science. The purpose behind penning this article is to share
some practicable ideas for your next project, which will not only
boost your confidence in Data Science but also play a critical part
in enhancing your skills.

Data really powers everything that we do.

— Jeff Weiner
Data Science Books You Must Read in 2020
Have a look, why you should read them?
towardsdatascience.com

Top Interesting Data Science Projects

Understanding Data Science can be quite confusing at first, but
with constant practice, you can soon begin to grasp the various
notions and terminologies in the subject. The best way to
gain more exposure to Data Science apart from
going through the literature is to take on some helpful projects
which will not only upskill you but will also make your resume
more impressive.

In this section, we will share a handful of fun and interesting

project ideas with you, which are spread across all skill levels,
ranging from beginners, intermediate, and veterans.

But before diving into this you can also check out some cool
Python Project Ideas for Python Developers here —
10 Cool Python Project Ideas for Python Developers
A list of interesting ideas and projects you can build using Python
towardsdatascience.com

1. Building Chatbots
 Language: Python

 Dataset: Intents JSON file

 Source Code: Build Your First Python Chatbot Project

Chatbots play a pivotal role for businesses as they can

effortlessly handle a barrage of customer queries and
messages without any slowdown. They have single-handedly
reduced the customer service workload for us by automating a
majority of the process. They do this by utilizing techniques
backed with Artificial Intelligence, Machine
Learning, and Data Science.

Chatbots work by analyzing the input from the customer and

replying with an appropriate mapped response. To train the
chatbot, you can use Recurrent Neural Networks with
the intents JSON dataset while the implementation can be
handled using Python. Whether you want your chatbot to be
domain-specific or open-domain depends on its purpose. As these
chatbots process more interactions, their intelligence and accuracy
also increase.

Read interesting articles on Python —

Top Python Libraries for Data Science
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Top Python IDEs and Code Editors with noteworthy features
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2. Credit Card Fraud Detection

Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash
  Language: R or Python

 Dataset: Data on the transaction of credit cards is used

here as a dataset.

 Source Code: Credit Card Fraud Detection using

Python

Credit card frauds are more common than you think, and

lately, they’ve been on the higher side. Figuratively speaking, we’re
on the path to cross a billion credit card users by the end of
2022. But thanks to the innovations in technologies like Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science, credit card
companies have been able to successfully identify and intercept
these frauds with sufficient accuracy.

Simply put, the idea behind this is to analyze the customer’s

usual spending behavior, including mapping the
location of those spendings to identify the fraudulent
transactions from the non-fraudulent ones. For this project, you
can use either R or Python with the customer’s transaction
history as the dataset and ingest it into decision
trees, Artificial Neural Networks, and Logistic
Regression. As you feed more data to your system, you should be
able to increase its overall accuracy.
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3. Fake News Detection

 Language: Python

 Dataset/Packages: news.csv

 Source Code: Detecting Fake News

We’re sure fake news needs no introduction. In today’s all

connected world, it has become ridiculously easy to share fake
news over the internet. Every once in a while, you can see false
information being spread online from unauthorized sources
that not only cause problems to the people targeted but also has
the potential to cause widespread panic and even violence.

To curb the spread of fake news, it is crucial to identify the

authenticity of the information, which can be done using this Data
Science project. For this, you can use Python and build a model
with TfidfVectorizer and PassiveAggressiveClassifier to
separate the real news from the fake one. Some of the Python
libraries suited for this project are pandas, NumPy,
and scikit-learn, and for the dataset, you can use News.csv.
Full Pipeline Project: Python AI for detecting fake news with NLP
A full project from data wrangling, through model development, and web deployment.
towardsdatascience.com
4. Forest Fire Prediction
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Building a forest fire and wildfire prediction system will be

another good use of the capabilities offered by Data Science. A
wildfire or forest fire is essentially an uncontrolled fire in a forest.
Every incident of a forest wildfire has caused an immense amount
of damage to not only nature but the animal habitat and human
property as well.

To control and even predict the chaotic nature of wildfires, you can
use k-means clustering to identify major fire hotspots and their
severity. This could be useful in properly allocating resources. You
can also make use of the meteorological data to find common
periods, seasons for wildfires to increase your model’s accuracy.
Best Data Science Tools for Data Scientists
Data science tools, that make the tasks achievable
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5. Classifying Breast Cancer

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

 Language: Python

 Dataset: IDC (Invasive Ductal Carcinoma)

 Source Code: Breast Cancer Classification with Deep

Learning

In case you want to add a project related to the healthcare industry

to your portfolio, you can try building a breast cancer
detection system using Python. Breast cancer cases have been
on the rise lately, and the best possible way to fight breast cancer
is to identify it at an early stage and take appropriate preventive
measures.

To build such a system with Python, you can use

the IDC(Invasive Ductal Carcinoma) dataset, which
contains histology images for cancer-inducing malignant
cells, and you can train your model on this dataset. For this
project, you’ll find Convolutional Neural Networks better
suited for the task, and as for the Python libraries, you can
use NumPy, OpenCV, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn,
and Matplotlib.
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6. Driver Drowsiness Detection

 Language: Python

 Source Code: Driver Drowsiness Detection System

with OpenCV & Keras

Road accidents take many lives every year, and one of the causes
of road accidents is sleepy drivers. Being a potential cause for
danger on the road, one of the best ways to prevent this is to
implement a drowsiness detection system.

A driver drowsiness detection system such as this is yet another

project that has the potential to save many lives by constantly
assessing the driver’s eyes and alerting him with
alarms in case the system detects frequent closing of eyes.

A webcam is a must for this project to allow the system to

periodically monitor the driver’s eyes. To make this happen, this
Python project will require a deep learning model and
libraries such
as OpenCV, TensorFlow, Pygame, and Keras.

7. Recommender Systems(Movie/Web
Show Recommendation)
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

 Language: R

 Dataset: MovieLens

 Packages: recommenderlab, ggplot2, data.table,

reshape2

 Source Code: Movie Recommendation System Project

in R

Have you ever wondered how media platforms

like YouTube, NetFlix, and others recommend you what to
watch next? To do so, they use a tool called
the recommender/recommendation system. It takes several
metrics into consideration, such as age, previously watched
shows, most-watched genre, watch frequency, and
feeds them into a Machine Learning model which then
generates what the user might like to watch next.

Based on your preference and input data, you can try to build
either a content-based recommendation system or a collaborative
filtering recommendation system. For this project, you can pick R
with the MovieLens dataset that covers ratings for over
58,000 movies, and as for the packages, you can
use recommenderlab, ggplot2, reshap2, and data.table.
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8. Sentiment Analysis
 Language: R

 Dataset: janeaustenR

 Source Code: Sentiment Analysis Project in R

Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis is a tool

backed by Artificial Intelligence, which essentially lets you
identify, gather, and analyze people’s opinions about a subject or a
product. These opinions could be from a variety of sources,
including online reviews, survey responses, and could involve a
range of emotions such as happy, angry, positive, love,
negative, excitement, and more.

Modern data-driven companies are the ones that benefit the most
from a sentiment analysis tool as it gives them the critical insight
about the people’s reaction to the dry run of a new product launch
or a change in business strategy. To build a system like this, you
could use R with janeaustenR’s dataset along with the tidytext
package.

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9. Exploratory Data Analysis

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

 Language: Python

 Packages: pandas, NumPy, seaborn, and matplotlib

 Source Code — Exploratory data analysis in Python

Data Analysis starts with EDA. The Exploratory Data

Analysis plays a key role in the data analysis process as this step
helps you make sense of your data and often involves visualizing
them for better exploration. For visualization, you can pick
from a range of options, such as histograms, scatterplots, or
heat maps. EDA can also expose unexpected results and outliers
in your data. Once you have identified the patterns and derived the
necessary insights from your data, you are good to go.

A project of this scale can easily be done with Python, and for the
packages, you can use pandas, NumPy, seaborn, and
matplotlib.

A great source for EDA datasets is the IBM

Analytics Community.

10. Gender Detection & Age Prediction

 Language: Python

 Dataset: Adience

 Packages: OpenCV

 Source Code: OpenCV Age Detection with Deep

Learning

Identified as a classification problem, this gender detection

and age prediction project will put both your Machine
Learning and Computer Vision skills to test. The goal here is
to build a system that takes a person’s image and tries to identify
their age and gender.
For this fun project, you can implement Convolutional Neural
Networks and use Python with the OpenCV package. You
can grab the Adience dataset for this project. Factors such
as makeup, lighting, facial expressions will make this
challenging and try to throw your model off, so keep that in mind.

11. Recognizing the Speech Emotions

 Language: Python

 Dataset: RAVDESS

 Packages: Librosa, Soundfile, NumPy, Sklearn,

Pyaudio

 Source Code: Speech Emotion Recognition with

librosa

Speech is one of the most fundamental ways of expressing

ourselves, and it hides various emotions inside it, such
as calmness, anger, joy, and excitement, to name a few. By
analyzing the emotions behind the speech, it is possible to use this
information to restructure our actions and services, and even
products, to offer a more personalized service to specific
individuals.

This Speech Emotion Recognition project tries to identify

and extract emotions from multiple sound files containing
human speech. To make something like this in Python, you can
use the Librosa, SoundFile, NumPy, Scikit-learn,
and PyAaudio packages. For the dataset, you can use
the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and
Song(RAVDESS), which has over 7300 files for you to use.

12. Customer Segmentation
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

 Language: R

 Source Code: Customer Segmentation using Machine

Learning

Modern businesses strive by delivering highly personalized

services to their customers, which would not have been possible
without some form of customer categorization or
segmentation. In doing so, organizations can easily structure
their services and products around their customers while targeting
them to drive more revenue.
For this project, you will be going to use unsupervised
learning to group your customers into clusters based on
individual aspects such as age, gender, region, interests, and
so on. K-means clustering or hierarchical clustering will be
suitable here, but you can also experiment with Fuzzy
clustering or Density-based clustering methods. You can use
the Mall_Customers dataset as sample data.

More Data Science Project Ideas to Build —

 Coronavirus visualizations

 Visualising climate change

 Uber’s pickup analysis

 Web traffic forecasting using time series

 Impact Of Climate Change On Global Food Supply

 Detecting Parkinson’s Disease

 Pokemon Data Exploration

 Earth Surface Temperature Visualization

 Brain Tumor Detection with Data Science

 Predictive policing

Conclusion
Through this article, we tried to cover more than 10 fun and
handy Data Science project ideas for you, which will help you
understand the ABCs of the technology. Being one of the hottest
in-demand domains in the industry, the future of Data Science
holds many promises, but to make the most out of the upcoming
opportunities, you need to be prepared to take on the challenges it
brings. Good luck!

Note: To eliminate problems of different kinds, I want to alert you

to the fact this article represent just my personal opinion I want to
share, and you possess every right to disagree with it.

If you have more suggestions or ideas, we’d love to hear

about them.