Supporting artefacts for College Achievement (Academic).

The following artefacts were submitted to SUSS as partial fulfillment of requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science in Business Analytics Capstone Project (ANL488). This end-to-end project was carried out over one semester together with an assigned supervisor who guided us throughout the entire process.

Throughout my four years in SUSS, we were taught various types of modelling techniques. I decided to choose something that I had an interest in and pursued it – predictive modelling. But I decided to give myself a little challenge – to do the entire capstone project in Python. Since taking up Information Technology (IT) as my minor, I thought of what better way to practice what was taught to good use – conducting an end-to-end business analytics project in Python. During the project, I was assigned under Dr. Wang Di, who guided me throughout these five months. Dr. Wang is conversant in Python and his research interest is in the healthcare sector, which I felt was a perfect match for me since I decided to do predictive modelling on the incidence of stroke.

One key thing that I have taken away from my past internship is that, if you don’t know, go and find out and learn, no one will spoon-feed you. Given that my project would be conducted solely in Python, I had to learn about data manipulation, pre-processing, and modelling in Python. At the same time, I was taking a course on AI4I, Foundations in AI, which helped immensely with the transition of doing the project in Python from SPSS Modeler. The libraries I used most frequently were scikit-learn and OneHotEncoding. These are libraries that I have never come across during my minor modules and had to learn how to use them.

I felt that choosing IT as my minor to complement my major was the right move. It has given me the foundation in Python which gave me the push to try doing a whole project solely in Python considering that I am trained in SPSS. I also learned during this semester that I am accountable for my own actions. Dr. Wang was there to guide me in the right direction and to clarify any doubts that I had. Although he sets up weekly meetings, it was not mandatory to attend. However, having such weekly meetings helped keep me accountable for my project, and should I have any doubts, I should not hesitate to ask and clarify with him.

Overall, working on ANL488 has taught me a lot of valuable hard and soft skills which will be useful for me in the future. Learning is a lifelong skill; it doesn’t stop just because we have finished our education. There will always be new things to learn or old skills to improve on.