As the end of the Data Science portion of my bootcamp draws near,our newfound skills were put to the test into a 3-month long project. This project had its ups as well as its fair share of downs. However, I learned a lot of interpersonal skills as well as how to deliver an MVP with an understaffed team.

We were given a dataset from Yelp but weren’t given any direction on what to deliver. Having a project that was very open-ended became a double-edged sword. Initially, as a small team of four data scientists, we set out to improve the star rating system within Yelp and deliver an MVP to showcase our solution. Here’s a quick rundown of our project

The Problem

The problem is that many reviews are inaccurate or biased, we posed “is there a way to make sure that reviews are more accurate and overall improve the quality of said reviews? This i

Mission

Collectively, we decided this can be accomplished by conducting sentiment analysis using NLP

Difficulties

Team Issues

The first roadblock was within our own team members. After a few days passed, one of our team members was not buying into the product vision. It came to point where they left the team. Our already understaffed team reduced to three data scientists delivering a project meant for various data scientists, front end and back end developers as well as UX engineers. I saw this as another trial to overcome. Extra hours and a reasonable yet substantial vision progressed the team forward.

Large Dataset

This was the first time, I’ve have worked with a dataset this large. 6 million rows of reviews, business names, types of business and the star rating for each. We were stuck on how to focus our analysis. Initially, our analysis yielded no insight. However, we decided to look at reviews based on a certain word count. Keeping a threshold above 112 words, we conducted a sentiment analysis on 2 million reviews. Here’s the link to the python notebook on cleaning the data set

Conclusion

I reinforced a lot of my NLP techniques as well as SQL in the duration of this project. But the experience of working in a brand new team and going through team conflict has given me the knowledge to handle similar situations in my professional future.

Finshied MVP

Creative: A 5 min video summary of our project Yelp Star Rating Predictor: Interactive Website, type in a review and see what star rating our model will give