Aspiring data scientists have always believed that capstone projects play a very crucial role when it comes to learning data science well. That’s not just due to the advice of top data scientists, but also because of the saying of high achievers.
A noted German statistician & economist, E. F. Schumacher, said: “An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory”.
It is rightly believed that the pinnacle of any data science and analytics training programs is that they have a specially designed capstone project to provide practical application experience of data science to students. But at Digital Vidya, we like to go a bit beyond just the bare minimum.
We organize competitions in which all our data science & analytics students participate. With this, we make sure that our students are ready to tackle the real-life challenges in the data science domain. The sense of competition always helps with some extra kick, and that works in favour of our students.
After having conducted two successful capstone project competitions, we launched the third Internal Capstone Project Contest in January 2019, on the topic “Bank Marketing 2019”. A sense of excitement was seen amongst the participants as soon as the competition was launched, no wonder we saw a lot of interest.
It was a power-packed competition which insisted that the participants push their limits and identify their hidden potential. After having a thrilling competition, we are pleased to announce that Souvik Chowdhury came out as the winner of our Capstone Competition while Anand Singh was the first runner-up.
Souvik Chowdhury, the winner of our Capstone Competition further shared his experience and said that “My initial approach for capstone project was to blindly visualize the features and have a visual knowledge. After that, I took help from Correlation Analysis to dig in further. Moreover, I also tried to extract a new feature from the given feature. The chapters of feature selection from Digital Vidya’s course content helped me a lot to detect important features. Though there are plenty of feature selection/feature elimination methods, however, I decided to choose the basic feature selection method & also tried the same with various algorithms. Initially, I did split the training set into a training & test dataset and later applied various algorithms. Whichever algorithm gave the best results, I used that method to work on the test dataset. This was my primary approach.”
This particular Capstone Project was designed while keeping in mind the competitive environment of the banking industry and the increasing need to strategize the industry to enhance growth. The initiative of this project was to apply all aspects of data science in defining, designing and executing approaches to get a feasible solution.
However, the key takeaways of the project were to:
(i) Build the model to see if a customer will subscribe
(ii) Identify the influential factors to form marketing strategies
(iii) Improve long-term relationship with clients
Expressing her pleasure towards the third Competition for Digital Vidyarthis,, Shweta Gupta, the Vice President of the Technology Vertical at Digital Vidya stated that “It is vital for Data Science aspirants to continuously work with problem statements and apply the approaches of exploring data analysis, visualization, and model building to find solutions towards the stated problem. The Capstone Project Competitions are a great way to engage with our alumni and current learners, providing them with a platform to practice and exhibit their skills in solving complex data problems from different domains.”
The aim of the project was to expose the participants to the challenges in analyzing a real-world dataset. This Capstone Project focused on Data Extraction, Data Visualization, Data Analysis & Machine Learning, and Model Evaluation.
To know more about our Data Science & Analytics courses and to avail an opportunity to sit in a Free Orientation session, click here.
