BSIT 42042- Data Visualization
Assignment 03
Exploratory Data Analysis
In this assignment, you will use a given dataset and perform an exploratory analysis to better
understand the shape & structure of the data, investigate initial questions, and develop
preliminary insights & hypotheses. Your final submission will take the form of a presentation
consisting of captioned visualizations that convey key insights gained during your analysis.
Step 1: Dataset
Chicago Crimes, 2001–present - This dataset reflects reported incidents of crime (with the
exception of murders where data exists for each victim) that occurred in the City of Chicago
from 2001 to present, minus the most recent seven days. Data is extracted from the Chicago
Police Department's CLEAR (Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting) system.
For the assignment you are required to use the given CSV file as we have filtered sufficient
data for this assignment: from April 2022 to April 2023
Prior to analysis – you should write down an initial set of at least three questions you'd like
to investigate.
Step 2: Exploratory Visual Analysis
Next, you will perform an exploratory analysis of your dataset using a visualization tool such
as Tableau. You should consider two different phases of exploration.
In the first phase, you should seek to gain an overview of the shape & stucture of your dataset.
What variables does the dataset contain? How are they distributed? Are there any notable data
quality issues? Are there any surprising relationships among the variables? Be sure to also
perform "sanity checks" for patterns you expect to see!
In the second phase, you should investigate your initial questions, as well as any new
questions that arise during your exploration. For each question, start by creating a visualization
that might provide a useful answer. Then refine the visualization (by adding additional
variables, changing sorting or axis scales, filtering or subsetting data, etc.) to develop better
perspectives, explore unexpected observations, or sanity check your assumptions. You should
repeat this process for each of your questions, but feel free to revise your questions or branch
off to explore new questions if the data warrants.
If you are interested you are free to add any confirmatory analysis (Hypothesis testing) as an
additional part.
Final Deliverable:
Your final submission should take the form of a presentation slides that consists of 10 or
more captioned visualizations detailing your most important insights. Your "insights" can
include important surprises or issues (such as data quality problems affecting your analysis) as
well as responses to your analysis questions. To help you gauge the scope of this assignment,
see this example report analyzing data about motion pictures.
Each visualization image should be a screenshot exported from R, accompanied with a title and
descriptive caption (1-4 sentences long) describing the insight(s) learned from that view.
Provide sufficient detail for each caption such that anyone could read through your presentation
and understand what you've learned. You are free, but not required, to annotate your images to
draw attention to specific features of the data. You may perform highlighting within the
visualization tool itself, or draw annotations on the exported image.
The end of your presentation should include a brief summary of main lessons learned.
You are required to present your findings to the class on 10th of May, 2025. Each presentation
would be allocated maximum of 12 minutes followed by a Q&A session of 5 minutes.
Submission Details
This is an individual assignment. You may not work in groups.
Your completed exploratory analysis presentation is due by 1.30pm on 10th of MAY, 2025.
Submit the presentation to LMS on or before the deadline.