Exploratory Analysis of The Sakila Database Analysis (DVD Rentals)

Business Request

The Sakila DVD rental chain hired me as a freelancer to help them analyze their business. They asked me a series of very specific questions about the rentals:

• What is the mean of rental duration for all films?
• What is the most common rental duration?
• What is the most common rental rate?
• How is the replacement cost distributed?
• How many films of each rating does the store have?
• Does the film replacement cost vary depending on film rating?
• Give us the rental period in days.
• How are the rental days distributed?
• What is the highest daily rental rate for the films?
• What are the titles of the 5 films with the lowest daily rental rate?
• What are the titles of the 3 films with the highest daily rental rate?
• How many rentals were made in Lethbridge city?
• How many rentals were made in Woodridge city with a rental duration higher than 5 days?
• How many rentals were made at the store with id 2 or with a replacement cost lower than 10.99 USD?

Overview

• Importing the Sakila Database to Python.
• Importing the desired Pandas dataframe. Setting the index and parsing dates for better data handling.
• Exploring the dataframe.
• Data cleaning to drop any null values, if deemed desirable.
• Exploratory analysis of the data:
  • Mean of the rental_duration.
  • Most common rental_rate.
  • Distribution of the replacement_cost associated with the films.
  • Number of films per rating, and their associated replacement_cost.
  • Creation of a calculated column rental_days, that will show the rental duration in days.
  • Distribution of the rental_days.
  • Various analysis of the daily_rental_rate (e.g. highest daily_rental_rate, list of films with the lowest daily_rental_rate, etc.)
  • Various analysis of rentals in different cities.

Conclusions

• The Business request was efficiently handled, with all requested insights and providing additional supporting charts.
• The client was able to interpret the analysis and, as a result, decided to change the rental prices of certain titles, such as King Evolution and Minds Truman, and consider raising the lower rental rate by 50 cents, to a total of 1.49 USD.