Final Project General Guidelines

36-315: Statistical Graphics and Visualization, Summer 2026

For the final project, you will work individually and explore ONE dataset of your choosing. These following data and graphics requirements will help you pick your dataset. The dataset you choose should be something you are excited about.

The project will culminate in a report and a short video presentation, both due Wednesday, June 17 at 11:59pm.

Data Sources

Here are some repositories with many, many datasets to choose from:

• TidyTuesday Project (Highly recommended)

• FiveThirtyEight

• SCORE Sports Data Repository

• CMU Statistics & Data Science Data Repository

• Kaggle

• Data is Plural

• The US Government

• More links on GitHub

Feel free to use other sources; these are just suggestions.

Data Requirements

1. Your data must be contain a mix of categorical and quantitative variables and be complex enough that you can create at least 8 interesting graphics. (But you won’t be asked to submit 8; see below.) Datasets with only a few variables will not work.

2. You CANNOT use any of the datasets that were used in any previous assignments in this course or any other course you have taken. You must use a dataset that you have never worked with before.

Graphics Requirements

1. You are required to submit THREE high-quality data visualizations. Your options include:

   • Classic EDA graphics (e.g., side-by-side plots, facetted plots, scatterplots, etc.)

   • Dendrograms, PCA, MDS, or other clustering-based graphics

   • Choropleth maps, heat maps, or other map-type graphics

   • Time series plots

   • Text analysis graphics

   • Other graphics that the course did not cover (for inspiration, see here)

2. All graphics must be multivariate (i.e., involving 2+ variables).

3. All graphics must be in different formats.

4. Your graphics should tell a cohesive story to some extent. You are required to come up with THREE interesting, overarching questions to be answered with your data visualizations. You will use your graphics to provide a comprehensive analysis of those questions, as well as demonstrate your findings and conclusions.

5. You are required to include at least one formal statistical analysis to complement a graphic. (See report guidelines for more information.)