This is it!?! Yep, hard to believe, but after 12 grueling weeks, the culmination of of our data science bootcamp experience comes to a close with our Career Day presentations.
Going into my final project I knew I wanted to focus on a topic in the area of data science for social good. The thing with these types of topics is that in order to do good, you often need to deal with some pretty harsh and sobering problems. But sometimes the most important part of data science is using data to bring awareness to a problem, which in turn spurs discussion and collaboration towards a solution. With that in mind, I chose to examine prescription drug abuse. This is a growing epidemic in the U.S. and I wanted to do some exploratory analysis and see what the profile of addiction looks like so we can target prevention and treatment accordingly.
After considerable searching, I was able to gather data from several sources, with my primary data set consisting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), and survey data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the largest annual national and state-wide survey on substance abuse and mental health. My work only scratched the surface, but with more access to current and open data, its a problem that can be solved with the help of data science.
For a more detailed description and access to my code and presentation, you can visit my Github repo here. I also created an interactive D3.js choropleth map that shows the drug overdose deaths by county from 2002-2014. The D3 visualization can be viewed here. The visualization shows significant increases in deaths throughout the majority of the country, highlighting the severity of the problem.
As far as my journey into the world of data science, this isn’t the end…just time to write the next chapter.