Project Benson

Project Benson

For my first project at Metis I had the pleasure of working with Beatriz, Demi, and Nathan. We were tasked to look at NY turnstile data from Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to find optimal stations and times to maximize public outreach for a hypothetical organization. The four of us decided upon the scenario where we would be fundraising for a competition to win a trip to see narwhals.

The Narwhal Foundation event was to be held on Saturday July 20th, 2019. Consequently we focused on finding data from prior years that corresponded to the week leading up to it. To tackle the project we broke off into pairs:

• Demi and Nathan working on weather data (5 yrs)
• Beatriz and me working on turnstile data (1 yr)

We learned how to handle data science tools including: Pandas, NumPy, Seaborn, and Matplotlib. There was lots of struggle with using Pandas to clean the many irregularities in our data and how to render the best graph our results.

Eventually we found the top four stations for Mon-Fri which for the most part had the same stations each day. We mapped out where we would position our team for the highest exit traffic during four hour intervals to sell products that would be picked out based on weather predictions.

Overall it was a very fruitful learning experience the first week of class, and I hope to continue getting lots of valuable pieces of knowledge during the next three months.

Here is a link to all the work that we put into the project:
https://github.com/NathanMaton/benson