Valentine's Day đŸ’—


MicroProject Overview

The NRF (National Retail Federation) is the world's largest retail trade association. Its members include department stores, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, and independent retailers, chain restaurants, grocery stores, and multi-level marketing companies. NRF has surveyed consumers about how they plan to celebrate Valentine’s Day annually for over a decade.

In this MicroProject, you work with pandas to do Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), calculate many descriptive statistics about consumer habits around Valentine's Day, and create line plots to analyze the trends over time.

MicroProject in Visual Studio Code
MicroProject in Visual Studio Code
Subset of the NRF dataset including annual spending on various categories
Subset of the NRF dataset including annual spending on various categories
Line plot of NRF's expected Valentine's Day spend per person
Line plot of NRF's expected Valentine's Day spend per person
Line plot of NRF's Valentine's Day total spending on flowers (in billions, USD)
Line plot of NRF's Valentine's Day total spending on flowers (in billions, USD)

First Time Doing a MicroProject?

Each MicroProject starts with a notebook that we provide to you to get started! You will need to configure a git repository to connect to our `microprojects` remote where we release the starter notebook.


Fetch the Initial Files

In your terminal, navigate to your GitHub repository and merge the initial files by running the following commands:

git fetch microprojects
git merge microprojects/microproject-valentines-day --allow-unrelated-histories -m "Merging initial files"

Complete the Notebook

If the commands above were successful, you have merged in the initial files to start on the MicroProject.

  • Find the new microproject-valentines-day folder.
  • Open microproject-valentines-day.ipynb and complete the MicroProject!

Commit and Grade Your Notebook

Once you have finished your notebook, you must use the built-in GitHub Action to preform automated grading of your MicroProject notebook! You will need to commit your work and then manually run the GitHub Action.

Commit Your Work

To commit your notebook, run the standard git commands in your terminal:

git add -u
git commit -m "microproject completed"
git push

Grade Your Notebook

To grade your notebook, you will need to visit your GitHub repository in your browser.

  • Visit your GitHub repository in your browser
  • Click on the "Actions" tab
  • Under "Workflows", find the workflow for this microproject
  • Click the "Run Workflow" in the blue box, and then the green "Run Workflow"
  • After about 10 seconds, you should see a new job that has started running
    • You can click on the job to watch it run in real-time
    • It will take ~1 minute to run and grade
  • Once the running is complete, the autograding summary will be available!