2023: Week 52 - Preppin' Classification

Challenge by: Jenny Martin

We've reached the end of another year and so, before we look forward to the next year, let's take a look back! This challenge is our 255th! Thank you to all who support Preppin' Data! 

Running this community project takes a lot of hard work, creativity and time behind the scenes, but something we've been asked for for many years is a way to understand the difficulty and techniques used by past challenges. At last, we bring you the data behind that! I've been chipping away at this in the background for many, many weeks and, unsurprisingly, there are definitely a few inconsistencies that we'll need to clean up! Never let your users have free text input, right? 

This will not only help everyone participating in Preppin' Data find the challenges they're most interested in, but it will also help us identify gaps and create challenges that continue to use different skillsets. At some point, it will also give us the opportunity to build a helpful dashboard, but that will probably need to wait until the new year now!

Input

One input this week, detailing all the techniques used for each challenge:

Requirements

  • Input the data
  • Split the themes, so each theme/technique has its own field
  • Reshape the data so all the themes are in 1 field
  • Group the themes together to account for inaccuracies
    • Don't worry about being too accurate here, the main things to focus on it grouping things like Join/Joins and Aggregate/Aggregation. The way we've chosen to do it leaves us with 73 values, but that did involve a lot of manual grouping.
  • Reshape the data so we can see how many challenges each Technique appears in, broken down by Level (as per the output)
  • Create a Total field across the levels for each Technique
  • Rank the challenges based on the Total field to find out which Techniques we should prioritise for challenge making
  • Output the data

Output


  • 7 fields
    • Priority
    • Technique
    • Beginner
    • Intermediate
    • Advanced
    • 3-in-1
    • Total
  • 73 rows (74 including headers)
You can download the output from here.

After you finish the challenge make sure to fill in the participation tracker, then share your solution on Twitter using #PreppinData and tagging @Datajedininja, @JennyMartinDS14 & @TomProwse1

You can also post your solution on the Tableau Forum where we have a Preppin' Data community page. Post your solutions and ask questions if you need any help! 

Popular posts from this blog

2024: Week 1 - Prep Air's Flow Card

Image
Created by: Carl Allchin Welcome to a New Year of Preppin' Data challenges. For anyone new to the challenges then let us give you an overview how the weekly challenge works.  Each Wednesday the Preppin' crew (Jenny, myself or a guest contributor) drop a data set(s) that requires some reshaping and/or cleaning to get it ready for analysis.  You can use any tool or language you want to do the reshaping (we build the challenges in Tableau Prep but love seeing different tools being learnt / tried). Share your solution on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, GitHub or the Tableau Forums Fill out our tracker so you can monitor your progress and involvement The following Tuesday we will post a written solution in Tableau Prep (thanks Tom) and a video walkthrough too (thanks Jenny) As with each January for the last few years, we'll set a number of challenges aimed at beginners. This is a great way to learn a number of fundamental data preparation skills or a chance to learn a new tool — New Year...
Read more

2023: Week 1 The Data Source Bank

Image
 Created by: Carl Allchin Welcome to a New Year of Preppin' Data. These are weekly exercises to help you learn and develop data preparation skills. We publish the challenges on a Wednesday and share a solution the following Tuesday. You can take the challenges whenever you want and we love to see your solutions. With data preparation, there is never just one way to complete the tasks so sharing your solutions will help others learn too. Share on Twitter, LinkedIn, the Tableau Forums or wherever you want to too. Tag Jenny Martin, Tom Prowse or myself or just use the #PreppinData to share your solutions.  The challenges are designed for learning Tableau Prep but we have a broad community who complete the challenges in R, Python, SQL, DBT, EasyMorph and many other tools. We love seeing people learn new tools so feel free to use whatever tools you want to complete the challenges.  A New Year means we start afresh so January's challenges will be focused on beginners. We will u...
Read more

How to...Handle Free Text

Image
Free isn't always a good thing. In data, Free text is the example to state when proving that statements correct. However, lots of benefit can be gained from understanding data that has been entered in Free Text fields. What do we mean by Free Text? Free Text is the string based data that comes from allowing people to type answers in to systems and forms. The resulting data is normally stored within one column, with one answer per cell. As Free Text means the answer could be anything, this is what you get - absolutely anything. From expletives to slang, the words you will find in the data may be a challenge to interpret but the text is the closest way to collect the voice of your customer / employee. The Free Text field is likely to contain long, rambling sentences that can simply be analysed. If you count these fields, you are likely to have one of each entry each. Therefore, simply counting the entries will not provide anything meaningful to your analysis. The value is in ...
Read more