Everyone Can Learn Data Scholarship
📖 Background
The second "Everyone Can Learn Data" Scholarship from DataCamp is now open for entries.
The challenges below test your coding skills you gained from beginner courses on either Python, R, or SQL. Pair them with the help of AI and your creative thinking skills and win $5,000 for your future data science studies!
The scholarship is open to secondary and undergraduate students, and other students preparing for graduate-level studies (getting their Bachelor degree). Postgraduate students (PhDs) or graduated students (Master degree) cannot apply.
The challenge consist of two parts, make sure to complete both parts before submitting. Good luck!
1️⃣ Part 1 (Python) - Dinosaur data 🦕
📖 Background
You're applying for a summer internship at a national museum for natural history. The museum recently created a database containing all dinosaur records of past field campaigns. Your job is to dive into the fossil records to find some interesting insights, and advise the museum on the quality of the data.
💾 The data
You have access to a real dataset containing dinosaur records from the Paleobiology Database (source):
| Column name | Description |
|---|---|
| occurence_no | The original occurrence number from the Paleobiology Database. |
| name | The accepted name of the dinosaur (usually the genus name, or the name of the footprint/egg fossil). |
| diet | The main diet (omnivorous, carnivorous, herbivorous). |
| type | The dinosaur type (small theropod, large theropod, sauropod, ornithopod, ceratopsian, armored dinosaur). |
| length_m | The maximum length, from head to tail, in meters. |
| max_ma | The age in which the first fossil records of the dinosaur where found, in million years. |
| min_ma | The age in which the last fossil records of the dinosaur where found, in million years. |
| region | The current region where the fossil record was found. |
| lng | The longitude where the fossil record was found. |
| lat | The latitude where the fossil record was found. |
| class | The taxonomical class of the dinosaur (Saurischia or Ornithischia). |
| family | The taxonomical family of the dinosaur (if known). |
The data was enriched with data from Wikipedia.
# Import the pandas and numpy packages
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
# Load the data
dinosaurs = pd.read_csv('data/dinosaurs.csv')# Preview the dataframe
dinosaurs💪 Challenge I
Help your colleagues at the museum to gain insights on the fossil record data. Include:
- How many different dinosaur names are present in the data?
- Which was the largest dinosaur? What about missing data in the dataset?
- What dinosaur type has the most occurrences in this dataset? Create a visualization (table, bar chart, or equivalent) to display the number of dinosaurs per type. Use the AI assistant to tweak your visualization (colors, labels, title...).
- Did dinosaurs get bigger over time? Show the relation between the dinosaur length and their age to illustrate this.
- Use the AI assitant to create an interactive map showing each record.
- Any other insights you found during your analysis?
# Import all the necessary libraries for this part
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import plotly.express as px
import seaborn as sns
from scipy.interpolate import make_interp_spline📝 How many different dinosaur names are present in the data?
There are 1042 different dinosaur names in the table dinosaurs.
🦕 Which was the largest dinosaur? What about missing data in the dataset?
There is no overall largest dinosaur but the Supersaurus and Argentinosaurus are the largest dinosaurs with a length of 35 metres. Both of these tall dinosaurs have long necks, which could suggest that they evolved/adapted long necks to reach for leaves in trees (they are both herbivores). The smallest dinosaur, which is not show in the table below, is the Shanag with a length of 0.45 metres.
There is missing data in 5 columns with around 1400 missing values per column, except region with only 42. Considering there are 4951 rows and 9% of the data is missing, this is not significant. null is used to represent these missing values in the dinosaurs table. Nothing is specified in the challenge box, so I do not change anything.
📊 What dinosaur type has the most occurrences in this dataset?
The most common type of dinosaur found in the dataset is the Ornithopod with 811 ocurrences. The least common dinosaur type is the armored dinosaur with 307 ocurrences.