Obesity and City Composition: Exploring the Impact of Environmental Stimuli

I am very excited to share my final capstone project for the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate. I found this 9-course certificate program to be a solid introduction to all things data science, starting with methodology and touching many of the cornerstones of the field such as machine learning and data visualization. Overall, I completed the certificate in approximately three months.

While the first eight courses were lecture-based, the final course required students to design and complete an in-depth exploratory study using methods acquired throughout the program. This involved coming up with a question that could be solved using the location data provider Foursquare.

I decided to investigate the link between city composition and obesity, utilizing the Foursquare API, health statistics from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and geographical data scraped from various sources. Please use the links below to view my formal report, informal blog post and associated Python code.

• Capstone Project Report
• Capstone Project Blog Post
• Capstone Project Jupyter Notebook

Thanks for checking out my project! I’d love to hear what you think.