Visualizaing Unemployment Rate Data During last 40 Years

please click to watch overview video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u4T2LJBCVY

Project Description

In this project, student will work on the US employment data available on Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Data description can be found on the website. In particular, we will focus on employment rate by state.

How to Execute

The final version is uploaded as TimeSeriesVisualization.zip. Put the content of the root folder on your root directory and open it in a webbrowser.

Data File Preprocessing

The data file used for this project is from BLS website. I did some preprocessing (in Python) for following purposes:

1. change date format
2. change data such that the data of each state is stored in a single column.
3. Sorting the Data File Base on date

Finding 1: Effect of Financial Crisis (2007-2008) on Unemployment Rate

The financial crisis of 2007–09, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008-09 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. financial crisis had a great effect on US unemployment rate. The U.S. unemployment rate increased to 10.1% by October 2009, the highest rate since 1983 and roughly twice the pre-crisis rate. you can observe the effect of USA financial crisis in the following figure.

Finding 2: post-World War II Economic Downturn Effect on Unemployment Rate in 1983

Finding 3: Yearly Increase of Unemployment Rate in May

according to the unemployment rate time series. unemployment increase each year in May and decrease again in August. The reason of this change of Rate is the student graduation season which is usually in May 15th.

Bonus: Sudden Drop Causes:

• financial crisis in 2008
• post-World War II economic downturn occurred in the early 1980s