DATA ANALYSIS

Your manager wants to get up to speed on the Omaha new car market. You have been asked to create a brief highlighting local market auto trends over the past 5 years.

Students will take the provided data set (attached below) and analyze for meaning and insights. Your choice on how best to analyze the data (use the tool/tools of your choosing). Submit your findings and insights (any combination of data visualizations/text). The focus here is the practice analyzing a data set from start to finish.

Create a brief (you can do this as a summary document or mini paper) that is 3-6 pages (you want to make sure you’re providing enough information to be meaningful). Think about what information would be important for helping your manager understand this market (assume they don’t have any knowledge of the market). Be sure to apply data visualization best practices – select appropriate graphs, reduce clutter and make sure they effectively communicate the point you are trying to get across. Make sure you look at how the data is trending over the 5 years worth of data given (hint: this might be to help you look at a data set over time – like you would with the final project data set).

Do not start this assignment the day it is due. Good analysis takes some time! Sometimes my best ideas on how to tell the story or a different approach come to me hours or days after I’ve started an analysis. Sometimes those ideas just need a little time to bake in your brain!

Assignments will be graded on:

10 points – attention to detail and quality of writing – was the brief free of typos, data mistakes and grammar errors?

15 points – completeness and effort. Were all elements included and thoughtful, strategic effort shown?

25 points – summarization and analysis of data. Was the data presented in a compelling, accurate and impactful way? Did it tell a story? Was a 5 year trends presented at least once?

Omaha New Vehicle Registrations 2017-2021.xlsx (NOTE- I AM ALSO ATTACHING IT BELOW IN CASE THIS LINK DOES NOT WORK)

About the data: A new vehicle registration is recorded when a person registers their new vehicle in their county of residence. This information is not the same as a sale (a sale would be when a dealer sells the car) but is helpful at understanding sales when that information may not be publicly available.

This map is provided to help you understand the geography of the data set. The data set consists of new car registrations from the highlighted yellow areas only (the Omaha DMA or designated market area).