W2020 MDST Project: a survery of the dining halls of the University of Michigan
Majority of the students at University of Michigan have a dining hall meal plan. While there is a large variety of options to choose from, the nutritional values derived from that specific dish/meal remains ambigious because no one really pays attention to these details. In this project, we try and assess the trends in nutritional values and come up with statistics to help you make informed decisions on what you eat at the dining halls!
The goal of this project is to conduct a detailed analysis of the state of the University of Michigan dining halls. Questions that we hope to answer include:
- Which dishes are the most popular ones (occur most frequently)
- Suppose we choose a dish, which dining hall is it most likely to occur in?
- What are the trends in nutritional value of the food across all dining halls
- What is the average nutritional value a student gets from one meal?
- Which items are the healthiest and unhealthiest?
- many more...!
This is an exploratory project, so feel free to bring up anything you would like answered or explored! The scope of this project is not yet set in stone.
Join this project if you have any interest in the following:
- web systems and scraping
- data visualization
- regression models
- making predictions using data
- Acquaint members with the basic structure and timeline of a data science project
- Provide members with practical, hands-on experience in tools commonly used in industry and research: web scraping, regression techniques, version control, etc.
- Identify key trends in dining halls and generate applicable insights that could help inform students about nutritional value of what they are eating
- Create a model which predicts the overall nutrition from a specific meal
- Publish results and visualization.
- Have fun and learn something! :)
- Compare the results across different universities and see how they compare with regard to University of Michigan