Part 9: Capstone Projects
Prove what you've learned.
Throughout this book, you've been building skills chapter by chapter — visualizing data, computing summaries, calculating probabilities, constructing confidence intervals, running hypothesis tests, fitting regression models, communicating results. Your Data Detective Portfolio tracked your progress along the way. Now it's time to put everything together in a single, sustained project that demonstrates your ability to do real statistical work from start to finish.
This section offers three capstone project options, each designed to challenge you in different ways.
Capstone Project 1: Public Health Data Investigation puts you in the shoes of a public health analyst. You'll work with a real dataset from the CDC, WHO, or a state health department to investigate a question about health outcomes. This project emphasizes the full analytical pipeline: formulating a research question, exploring the data, testing hypotheses, building a regression model, and considering the ethical implications of your findings. If you're interested in health, medicine, epidemiology, or public policy, this one's for you.
Capstone Project 2: Business Analytics Report asks you to think like a data analyst at a company. You'll analyze a business dataset — retail sales, customer behavior, marketing campaign performance — and produce an executive-level report. This project emphasizes practical communication: your audience is a manager who needs actionable insights, not a statistics professor who wants to see your formulas. If you're interested in business, marketing, economics, or management, this is your track.
Capstone Project 3: Social Justice Data Audit puts your statistical skills in service of equity. You'll investigate a dataset for evidence of bias or inequality — in education, criminal justice, hiring, housing, or lending. This project emphasizes careful group comparisons, effect sizes, and the ethical responsibility that comes with analyzing data about real people's lives. If you're interested in sociology, political science, law, social work, or public policy, this project will push you in the best way.
All three projects are assessed using the same rubric, which evaluates eight dimensions of your work: question formulation, data handling, statistical analysis, visualization, interpretation, ethics, communication, and reproducibility. The rubric is included in this section so you know exactly what "excellent" looks like before you start.
Choose the project that excites you most. Do the work honestly. Show what you know. You've earned this.