Date Last Updated: 4/2/2022
**This project is still ongoing as of today.
In this project, I am interested in exploring the National Material Capabilities data set containing annual values for total population, urban population, iron and steel production, energy consumption, military personnel, and military expenditure of all state members, currently from 1816-2016. You can download the uncleaned dataset used in this project from the link above. The widely-used Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) index is based on these six variables and is included in the data set. The goal of this project is to explore and gain insights as to how military expense and energy consumption has changed over time, how much of the total population serves as military personnel on average, etc.
After I’ve gained some insights, I will then translate these insights into visualizations with Tableau; instead of creating a static report, I wanted to make an interactive one so users can have fun analyzing it. Furthermore, if users are only interested in certain years or countries, they will be able to filter out the unneeded values.
I also look at this as an opportunity to improve my SQL and Tableau skills. Before I started with the queries in SQL, I first cleaned up and normalized the dataset in Google Sheets where I made sure that all the data was consistent for analysis and removed unneeded columns. Afterward I normalized the datasets into the third normal form which resulted in the creation of 5 datasets which will be the tables in our database.
data folder : This folder consists of all the datasets that were used in my analysis and visualizations. usa_milex.csv is the result of query 4.
NMC_Documentation_v6_0_final_v2.pdf: A pdf documentation where you can read about the variables used in my analysis and what they stand for. Please flip to page 10 for all variables used.
military_expense_analysis.sql: An SQL file that contains all my queries that I’ve written to gather insights before visualizing them.
Please click here to access this project’s visuals on Public Tableau.
I would like to thank The Correlates of War for making this dataset accessible for download.