10 Unique & Industry-Relevant Data Analysis Projects for Your Resume
This document outlines 10 data analysis project ideas designed to showcase a wide range of
in-demand skills. Each project is framed around a real-world business problem, uses publicly
available datasets, and suggests a final output that would impress recruiters.
1. SaaS Subscription Churn Prediction & Driver Analysis
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: Moves beyond simple reporting into predictive
analytics that directly impacts revenue. This is a top priority for any
subscription-based company (e.g., Netflix, Spotify, HubSpot).
● The Business Problem: Which of our customers are most likely to cancel their
subscription next month, and what user behaviors are the strongest predictors of
churn? How can we proactively intervene?
● Potential Datasets: IBM Telco Customer Churn
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Data Cleaning: Handling missing values and varied data types.
○ Feature Engineering: Creating new metrics like 'tenure groups' or
'has_dependents'.
○ Predictive Modeling: Building and evaluating a classification model (e.g.,
Logistic Regression, Random Forest).
○ Model Interpretation: Explaining why the model makes its predictions using
feature importance.
○ Business Acumen: Recommending actions based on findings (e.g., "Target
users with low tenure and month-to-month contracts with a special offer.").
●
● Your Final Output: A well-documented Jupyter Notebook on GitHub and a one-page
summary slide outlining the key drivers of churn and your strategic
recommendations.
2. E-commerce Return Rate Deep-Dive
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: Analyzing returns is a huge, real-world problem that
directly impacts a company's bottom line. It shows you can analyze a Profit & Loss
(P&L) line item, not just revenue.
● The Business Problem: Why are customers returning products? Are there specific
product categories, suppliers, or even product description keywords associated with
higher return rates?
● Potential Datasets: Olist E-commerce Dataset (requires joining sales, products, and
reviews tables).
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ SQL/Pandas: Merging data from multiple sources.
○ Root Cause Analysis: Using Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) to drill down
into the problem.
○ Text Analysis (NLP): Analyzing text in return reasons or customer reviews
for common themes using libraries like TextBlob.
○ Data Visualization: Creating clear charts in Tableau, Power BI, or Seaborn
that highlight problematic product categories.
●
● Your Final Output: A dashboard that allows a user to filter by product category and
see return rates and common return reasons, accompanied by a report of your
findings.
3. Last-Mile Delivery Performance Analysis
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: The "last mile" of delivery is notoriously complex and
expensive. Optimizing this is a top priority in logistics, e-commerce, and food delivery.
● The Business Problem: Where are our delivery delays happening? Can we identify
bottlenecks in our network? Are certain carriers performing better than others in
specific regions?
● Potential Datasets: Olist E-commerce Dataset (has rich logistics data with
estimated vs. actual delivery times).
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Time-Series Analysis: Calculating delivery times and delays from timestamp
data.
○ Geospatial Analysis: Mapping delivery routes and visualizing delay hotspots
by city or state using libraries like Geopandas or Folium.
○ Statistical Analysis: Using hypothesis testing to see if the difference in
delivery times between two carriers is statistically significant.
○ Dashboarding: Creating a performance dashboard for a hypothetical
logistics manager.
●
● Your Final Output: A GitHub repository with your code and a map visualization of
delivery hotspots, plus a summary report for management.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) & Segmentation
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: CLV is a critical marketing metric that hiring managers
love. It shows you can think about long-term customer value, not just single
transactions.
● The Business Problem: Who are our most valuable customers? How can we
segment our customers into groups like 'champions,' 'at-risk,' and 'new' to tailor our
marketing efforts effectively?
● Potential Datasets: Online Retail II Dataset from UCI
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ RFM Analysis: Calculating Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value for
each customer.
○ Clustering: Using K-Means clustering on the RFM scores to create distinct
customer segments.
○ Data Transformation: Aggregating transactional data up to the customer
level.
○ Business Strategy: Describing each segment and recommending specific
marketing actions.
●
● Your Final Output: A detailed report or blog post that defines each customer
segment, visualizes their value, and proposes a targeted marketing strategy for each
group.
5. Dynamic Pricing Analysis for Airbnb
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: This project combines regression, time-series, and
geospatial data to solve a modern pricing problem. It’s far more interesting than a
simple "predict house price" project.
● The Business Problem: How should hosts price their rentals? What is the impact of
seasonality, local events, day of the week, and property features on the daily rental
price in a specific city?
● Potential Datasets: Inside Airbnb (offers detailed, public data for dozens of cities).
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Regression Modeling: Building a model (e.g., XGBoost) to predict price
based on features.
○ Feature Engineering: Extracting amenities from a list, creating boolean flags
for features.
○ Time-Series Analysis: Analyzing how price changes by day of the week and
month of the year.
○ Geospatial Visualization: Plotting listings on a map and color-coding them
by price.
●
● Your Final Output: A Jupyter Notebook walking through your model and a simple
interactive web app (using Streamlit or Dash) where a user can input features and
get a suggested price.
6. A/B Test Result Analysis
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: A/B testing is the gold standard for data-driven
decision-making in tech. Correctly analyzing a test proves you have the core
statistical skills for a product or marketing analyst role.
● The Business Problem: We ran a test changing our 'Buy Now' button color from
blue to green. Did the change cause a statistically significant increase in the
conversion rate? Should we roll out the change?
● Potential Datasets: A/B Testing Dataset on Kaggle
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Statistical Rigor: Choosing the right statistical test (e.g., Chi-Squared test for
proportions or a Z-test).
○ Hypothesis Testing: Clearly stating your null and alternative hypotheses,
and calculating the p-value.
○ Metrics Definition: Calculating conversion rates and confidence intervals.
○ Clear Communication: Explaining results in simple, business-friendly terms.
●
● Your Final Output: A concise, one-page report that clearly states the hypothesis,
methodology, results (with p-value and confidence interval), and a final business
recommendation.
7. Brand Sentiment Analysis on Social Media
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: Shows you can work with unstructured text data and
use APIs, which are highly valuable technical skills for marketing and brand
management teams.
● The Business Problem: How do customers feel about our brand vs. our main
competitor? How did sentiment change after our recent product launch? What are the
most common complaints or praises?
● Potential Datasets: Use the Twitter API (Tweepy) or Reddit API (PRAW) to collect
posts, or find pre-collected datasets of tweets or reviews on Kaggle.
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ API Usage/Web Scraping: Gathering data from an external source.
○ Natural Language Processing (NLP): Cleaning text data and performing
sentiment analysis using VADER or TextBlob.
○ Time-Series Visualization: Plotting average sentiment over time to spot
trends.
○ Text Mining: Creating word clouds or n-gram charts to identify key topics.
●
● Your Final Output: A dashboard showing a live sentiment score comparison
between two brands and a summary of key topics of conversation.
8. Employee Attrition & Performance Analysis
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: "People Analytics" is a rapidly growing field. This
project shows you can apply data analysis to HR problems, which every
medium-to-large company faces.
● The Business Problem: Why are our employees leaving? Are there patterns related
to their department, role, tenure, or satisfaction scores? Can we identify the key
drivers of attrition to improve retention?
● Potential Datasets: IBM HR Analytics Employee Attrition & Performance
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Comparing distributions of variables for
employees who stayed vs. those who left.
○ Storytelling with Data: Weaving a narrative about the "employee journey"
and identifying key risk factors for attrition.
○ Predictive Modeling: Building a classifier to identify employees at high risk
of leaving.
○ Ethical Considerations: Demonstrating an understanding of how to handle
sensitive employee data.
●
● Your Final Output: A presentation (PowerPoint or Google Slides) for a hypothetical
HR leadership team, outlining the problems and suggesting data-backed solutions.
9. Credit Card Fraud Detection & Cost-Benefit Analysis
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: This adds a critical business layer to a classic project:
analyzing the cost of your model's errors. It focuses on working with a highly
imbalanced dataset, a common and difficult real-world challenge.
● The Business Problem: How can we build a model that catches the maximum
number of fraudulent transactions (high recall) while minimizing the number of
legitimate transactions we incorrectly block (low false positives)?
● Potential Datasets: Credit Card Fraud Detection on Kaggle
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Handling Imbalanced Data: Using techniques like SMOTE (over-sampling)
or adjusting class weights.
○ Advanced Model Evaluation: Using a Confusion Matrix, Precision, Recall,
and the Precision-Recall Curve (PRC) instead of accuracy.
○ Business Impact Analysis: Assigning a hypothetical dollar cost to false
positives and false negatives to calculate the model's net financial benefit.
●
● Your Final Output: A summary report presenting a cost-benefit analysis, showing
the value of fraud caught vs. the cost of blocking good customers, and
recommending the best model threshold based on financial outcomes.
10. Funnel Analysis of a Mobile App or Website
● Why it's Unique & Relevant: Funnel analysis is a core activity for any product
analyst or growth marketer. It demonstrates that you can analyze user journeys to
improve user experience and conversion.
● The Business Problem: At what stage are users dropping out of our sign-up (or
purchase) process? Where is the biggest drop-off point, and what can we
hypothesize about the cause?
● Potential Datasets: This often requires mock event-stream data which you can
generate. A simple CSV with user_id, event_name (e.g., 'app_download',
'signup_start', 'signup_complete'), and timestamp is sufficient.
● Skills You'll Showcase:
○ Sequential Analysis: Ordering user events chronologically to reconstruct
user paths.
○ Conversion Metrics: Calculating the conversion rate between each step of
the funnel.
○ Data Visualization: Creating a funnel chart (using Plotly or a dedicated tool)
to visually represent the drop-off.
○ Problem Identification & Hypothesis Generation: Pinpointing the weakest
step and brainstorming reasons for the drop-off.
●
● Your Final Output: A clear funnel visualization and a short analysis stating: "Our
biggest opportunity is the 'signup_start' to 'signup_complete' step. I hypothesize this
is due to the number of fields required on the form.
