data analysis
ASSESSMENT GUIDE
COMM5000
Data Literacy
Case Study Project
Milestone 1 Information
Term 3, 2024
UNSW Business School
Table of Contents
ASSESSMENT SUMMARY ......................................................................................................................... 2
ASSESSMENT ADMINISTRATIVE DETAILS .................................................................................................. 3
TURNITIN ............................................................................................................................................................. 3 LATE SUBMISSIONS ................................................................................................................................................ 3 EXTENSIONS ......................................................................................................................................................... 3 SMARTHINKING/STUDIOSITY/FEEDBACK HUB .............................................................................................................. 3 SPECIAL CONSIDERATION ......................................................................................................................................... 4
CASE STUDY INFORMATION ..................................................................................................................... 4
PROJECT OBJECTIVES .............................................................................................................................................. 4 COMM5000 CONTEXT ......................................................................................................................................... 4 SCHEDULE OF ENGAGEMENT FOR THE ENTIRE COURSE ................................................................................................... 4
MILESTONE 1: PRELIMINARY INSIGHT DEVELOPMENT .............................................................................. 5
DESCRIPTION OF ASSESSMENT TASK ........................................................................................................................... 5 APPROACH TO THE ASSESSMENT TASK ........................................................................................................................ 5 STRUCTURE OF THE REPORT ..................................................................................................................................... 6 SCHEDULE OF ENGAGEMENT FOR M1 ........................................................................................................................ 6 SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 7 SUPPORTING RESOURCES AND LINKS .......................................................................................................................... 7
MILESTONE 1 MARKING RUBRICS ............................................................................................................ 8
UNSW Business School 2
Assessment Summary
Assessment Task Weighting Due Date* Course Learning Outcomes
Milestone 1: Case Study Preliminary Insight Development 15% Week 4 1, 2
Milestone 1: Peer assessment 5%
Week 6
Milestone 1: Evaluation of Peer assessment Week 7
Milestone 2: Case Study project proposal: hypothesis tests 20% Week 7 (Friday 5PM) – 25 October 1, 2, 3, 4
Smarthinking/Studiosity/Feedback Hub feedback (formative task) 0% Week 9 (Thursday 5PM) – 7 November
Case Study business report 60% Week 10 (Friday 5PM) – 15 November 2, 3, 4, 5
* Due dates are set at Australian Eastern Standard/Daylight Time (AEST/AEDT). If you are located in a different time-zone, you can use the time and date converter.
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Assessment Administrative Details
Turnitin
Turnitin is an originality checking and plagiarism prevention tool that enables checking of submitted written work for
improper citation or misappropriated content. Each Turnitin assignment is checked against other students' work, the
Internet and key resources selected by your Course Coordinator.
If you are instructed to submit your assessment via Turnitin, you will find the link to the Turnitin submission in your
Moodle course site. You can submit your assessment well before the deadline and use the Similarity Report to improve
your academic writing skills before submitting your final version.
You can find out more information on the Turnitin information site for students.
Late Submissions
The parameters for late submissions are outlined in the UNSW Assessment Implementation Procedure. For
COMM5000, if you submit your assessments after the due date, you will incur penalties for late submission unless you
have Special Consideration (see below). Late submission is 5% per day (including weekends), calculated from the
marks allocated to that assessment (not your grade). Assessments will not be accepted more than 5 days late.
Extensions
You are expected to manage your time to meet assessment due dates. If you do require an extension to your
assessment, please make a request as early as possible before the due date via the special consideration portal on
myUNSW (My Student profile > Special Consideration). You can find more information on Special Consideration and
the application process below. Lecturers and tutors do not have the ability to grant extensions.
Smarthinking/Studiosity/Feedback Hub
The Feedback Hub at UNSW is a valuable resource for students looking to improve their writing skills. It offers
personalized feedback on drafts of essays, reports, and literature reviews, focusing on structure, grammar, referencing,
and language choice. The service is free for all UNSW students and is available 24/7, ensuring help is always
accessible. Students can expect comprehensive feedback within 24 hours, making it a quick and efficient way to
enhance their writing. For more details, visit the Feedback Hub website.
Please keep the following in mind when submitting your drafts to Studiosity:
• Make sure you click on the Studiosity link in the Moodle course (circled below in red) and NOT on the side bar
(highlighted in yellow)
• If you receive an error message indicating that Studiosity in unable to connect, please use a different browser
from the one that you are using.
• If you have any technical issues, please contact Studiosity directly on [email protected] or for a faster
response, visit their website: https://www.studiosity.com/ and use the chat box (yellow icon on the bottom
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right) to report your issue.
Special Consideration
Special consideration is the process for assessing the impact of short-term events beyond your control (exceptional
circumstances), on your performance in a specific assessment task.
What are circumstances beyond my control?
These are exceptional circumstances or situations that may:
• Prevent you from completing a course requirement,
• Keep you from attending an assessment,
• Stop you from submitting an assessment,
• Significantly affect your assessment performance.
Available here is a list of circumstances that may be beyond your control. This is only a list of examples, and your
exact circumstances may not be listed.
You can find more detail and the application form on the Special Consideration site, or in the UNSW Special
Consideration Application and Assessment Information for Students.
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Case Study Information
Business context: In recent years, the growing interest in wine has fuelled the expansion of the wine industry. As a
result, companies are investing in new technologies to enhance both wine production and sales. Quality certification
plays a vital role in these processes and currently relies heavily on wine tasting by human experts.
Case/Scenario: You consult a winery and help this company to predict or estimate human wine taste preferences at
the certification step. Knowing the wine quality will allow the winery to be better positioned to predict available
amounts and yearly sales. It will also support the oenologist wine tasting evaluations by potentially improving the
quality and speed of their decisions, and improve wine production. Furthermore, similar techniques can help in target
marketing by modelling consumer tastes from niche markets. In order to predict wine quality you will use a dataset
consisting of 4898 white and 1599 red vinho verde samples from Portugal's northwest region, and the statistical
methods covered in this course.
Project objectives
1. Looking at the provided dataset, is there any relationship (positive or negative) that can be used between wine
quality and any of the variables in the dataset? Does wine type (red or white) have an impact on our predictions
of wine quality? If so, how can these relationships be used to predict wine quality, using the methods used in this
class? The data provided is everything we know about these wines, and no external data sources are to be used.
Moreover, no knowledge about the chemical properties of wines is assumed or required: this project should be
seen as a business / statistical exercise. Please provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis supporting any
findings.
2. In addition, based on your analysis towards the Objective (1) identify weaknesses and limitations of the chosen
approach, and propose, at least in broad terms, a better approach. This proposed approach could include
additional data to be included, or a methodology that is able to better deal with data limitations. Please also
provide any supporting analysis for these additional considerations.
COMM5000 Context
This is a business question that is based on real data, although simulated for assessment purposes. The role you are
to play is one of a consultant contracted by a winery to assist with the analysis of data using the COMM5000 data
analysis tools, which include descriptive and inferential statistics.
The work will be scaffolded into two milestones M1 (20%) & M2 (20%) and a final project report (60%). Every
milestone will require you to use what you have learned to address specific aspects of the data. Generally, M1
consists of an exploratory data analysis, whereas M2 is concerned with identifying hypotheses and formulating key
inferential questions. In the final project report, all the insights gathered from M1 and M2 are used to model the data
to answer the project questions.
M1 is a peer-reviewed assessment, which means that your assessment will be assessed by some random peer
students. More details on this process below.
Schedule of engagement for the entire course
Upon request and as part of additional support for assessments one of the course teaching team members
might hold consultation sessions throughout the term. It is very important that you attend these sessions where we
will hold live synchronous sessions to provide more detailed information about the case study. During these
sessions, you are free to ask questions and discuss any aspects of the project.
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Milestone 1: Preliminary Insight Development
Report details
Week 4, Friday, at 5PM
15% (+5%)
Report: This is individual work. Reports will be checked for plagiarism.
1000 words (not including tables, graphs, and references)
Via Moodle course site
Description of assessment task
This first milestone aims to give you a better understanding of the datasets, variables, and questions in this Case
Study. This exploratory data analysis seeks to get the necessary insights so that a development plan can be
formulated to address the following key points of the case study project:
1) Data analysis: an in-depth description of the variables included in the dataset and the relationship between wine
quality and alcohol.
2) Effect of Wine Type on estimated wine quality.
You must submit a written development plan summarising the finding from the data explorations, describing any
patterns from comparing summary statistics of the variable of interest, and providing a plan on how you may
address the key questions (1) and (2). The report should be concise and well written.
Please note that you are not required to fully answer (1) and (2) in this milestone. Instead, you are required to
develop insights and understand the problem, as well as the datasets for your final project.
As a style guide, you may include some or all tables/graphs as an appendix and refer to them as appropriate in your
report. You should only include graphics and tables to support your analysis, conclusions, and findings. While
preparing your paper, you will encounter numerous tables and graphs, which are irrelevant to the analysis. So be
very selective and make good use of the page limit!
Approach to the assessment task
In week 1, we learnt how to represent the data using graphical tools, as well as numerical summaries. All these tools
are meant to give us an idea of what the data are ‘trying to tell us’. Can we make sense of the large numbers
of observations and tell a simple story or pick up a trend? This is what you will do in this milestone: understand
the data and what we are trying to find out from the data.
(A) Expected Tasks
(i) Download the data. This assessment requires the download o f the Excel file provided on your course Moodle page (file name: “Vinho_Verde.xlsm”). The dataset is related to red and white variants of the Portuguese "Vinho Verde" wine. For more details, consult: https://www.vinhoverde.pt/en/homepage or the reference [Cortez et al., 2009] which can be accessed from https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/10029/1/wine5.pdf .
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(ii) Data preparation. For this class, the data are already cleaned and complete. No cleaning is needed. However,
you must explain any data manipulations you perform and provide a rationale for them.
(iii) Variables of interest. Consider (1) and (2) above and focus only on the variables included in the provided dataset.
(B) The expected outcomes
The written work must provide a brief description of the Case Study problem and a clear plan of how the dataset
provided will address the key questions raised in the project description. You will have the opportunity to adjust,
revise and review this plan as we progress throughout the term. M1 analysis is based on COMM5000 content
covered in weeks 1, 2 and 3.
(i) Numerical summaries of the key variables of interest: present descriptive statistics of the variables in the data. You may represent these results in the form of tables.
(ii) These numerical summaries must be presented for 1) the entire sample, 2) only for red wines and 3) only for white wines.
(iii) For example, for each variable:
Mean Mode Median SD Min Max
Variable name 1 …
(ii) Graphical representations of some variables if you deem it important for to capture a trend or some interesting patterns in the data.
(iii) Analysis of the relationship between wine quality and alcohol content. Use scatter plots and describe your findings
(iv) What conclusions can you make from the inspection of these data summaries in the form of tables and graphs? For example, is there a pattern that you can identify?
(v) Your analysis should inform your development plan to address points (1) and (2) in Milestone 2 and in the final report. This plan may be revised later during your work on Milestone 2.
Structure of the report
* Introduction You should briefly introduce the topic and summarise the purpose and importance of this project for the
client. Then outline how this preliminary insight development plan will be structured. It is important to provide some
background information on this topic. You can find relevant information from https://www.vinhoverde.pt/en/homepage or
the reference [Cortez et al., 2009] which can be accessed from
https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/10029/1/wine5.pdf
* Data Summaries and Descriptive Statistics: Provide the necessary analysis to explore the variables. Describe
the trends and stories that emerge from the data summaries. Are any patterns emerging from the graphs or tables
you have constructed so far? Note: now that you have completed the first stage of data summaries, you have some
basic insight into the dataset. You can use this information to develop some plans of action to address points (1) and
(2) in Milestone 2 and in the final report.
* Conclusion: The conclusion should summarise the findings of your investigation and any concluding comments. It
should also provide your plan for the next step of the analysis.
* References: Every piece of external documents you use needs to be properly referenced. Please include page and
link so that your lecturer and tutor can efficiently check your work.
* It is suggested that you limit your report to a maximum of 8 pages including tables, graphs, and references.
Schedule of engagement for M1
Below you can find a summary of the deadlines related to M1. M1 requires not only the submission of the report (15%),
but also a high-quality, constructive contribution to the assessment of the other students’ works (5%). This peer
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assessment involves being randomly assigned to critically review a number of other students’ submissions. You cannot
choose which students to assess. You will 1) mark these submissions using a marking rubric to facilitate your job but
also 2) leave constructive feedback. It is important that you leave high-quality, constructive feedback. Your feedback will
be assessed, and you will also have the opportunity to evaluate the feedback you have received.
1. Week 4, Friday, deadline for submission of M1
2. Week 6, deadline for marking the submissions you were assigned to
3. Week 7, deadline for evaluating the feedback you have received
Submission instructions
• Via Moodle course site.
Supporting resources and links
- Dataset files: The Excel dataset file is available on Moodle. You only need to analyse the data that is included
in this file.
- Weekly seminar: The seminar coordinator will cover relevant project aspects using Excel during the
SEM session.
- Background information: See https://www.vinhoverde.pt/en/homepage or the reference [Cortez et al.,
2009] which can be accessed from
https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/10029/1/wine5.pdf
Milestone 1 Marking Rubrics