Your final project entails systematic extraction of decision-aiding insights out of a dataset provided to you in the Doc Sharing area. This project will provide you with hands-on experience in conducting and interpreting different types of function-wise statistical analysis. The focus of your analysis will be on marketing strategies and analysis-related topics. At times, you will be expected to conduct additional research on topics that are not adequately covered in your text, for example, data due diligence.

The first step in any data analytical undertaking is to conduct basic data due diligence, the focus of which is on assessing the scope and limitations of your data. This is an important step as virtually all business data contains some degree of imperfection, such as missing values, miscoded variables, or nonsensical values (such as a person being five hundred years old). Beyond looking for flaws in data, data due diligence also entails describing the basic characteristics of data, such as the number of variables, number of cases, ranges of values of individual variables, variable types, etc.

This week, as the first step in your data analytical project, you will put together a step-by-step outline of the data due diligence process that you would follow and provide a rationale for each step in your process.