At the start of this class, I didn’t even know what R was, and I couldn’t even create a new project in Posit Cloud. I learned a lot in a short period of time. I gained experience with data scraping, data cleaning, data visualization, and building interactive dashboards and Shiny applications. I also learned how to create programs that automatically collect, clean, organize, and analyze data, generate visualizations, and produce automated summaries and insights. Looking back at where I started, I’m surprised by how much I learned and how much confidence I gained using R throughout the semester.
I was responsible for collecting, cleaning, analyzing, and presenting the data. I combined stock market data, economic data, and survey responses, then cleaned and organized everything before starting the analysis. I created visualizations that showed stock prices, trading volume, portfolio growth, risk versus return, and rolling volatility to help explain the results. I also analyzed our investment survey by checking the quality of the responses, summarizing the results, building a conjoint regression model, and predicting the investment profiles that participants preferred the most. Finally, I documented the variables and exported all of the datasets and results into CSV files for the group. Working on this project helped me improve my R programming, data visualization, and data analysis skills. It also showed me how important it is to clean and validate data before drawing conclusions, since good analysis depends on having accurate and reliable data. Looking back, I’m proud of how much I accomplished, especially considering I started the semester with no experience using R.