School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sheffield
MAS6006 Statistical Consultancy, 2019/20 Project 2: Street Crime
1 Background
You are a team of statisticians working at a small Statistics and Data Science consultancy firm. You have been contracted by South Yorkshire Police to analyse data they have compiled on street crime, and to produce a short report. They have given you two spreadsheets1, containing data on recorded street crimes for the months of November and December in the year 2019. They want to know whether you can identify any crime ‘hot-spots’: regions (Lower layer Super Output Areas or “LSOAs”), where the number of recorded street crimes was abnormally large, compared with others (and relative to the population size).
They are interested in Sheffield only for this exercise: ignore crimes in Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham. They are particular interested in regions outside the city centre. City centre LSOAs are defined as Sheffield 042A, 042F, 042G, 073A, 073B, 073C, 073D, 074C, 074D and 074E.
They also want to be able to re-run your analysis each time a new monthly record is produced (using the two most recent months).
There are three deliverables for your client:
1. a written preliminary report, to help discussion at a first meeting with your client; 2. a written final report, presenting your methodology and results;
3. an R Shiny app that the client can use to re-run the analysis on a new data set.
You will also be required to submit an individual portfolio of work that provides evidence of your contribution to the group project.
2 Face-to-face meetings
The residential members of your group will attend three meetings. These will be role- playing exercises, where the teaching staff will play the roles of your company manager and your client.
1. Meeting with your company manager
You will have a short meeting with your company manager. Your manager is a statistician, but will not be working on the project with you. Your manager wants to hear how you plan to do the analysis, and will discuss your ideas with you.
1obtained from https://data.police.uk/data/
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You must propose the analysis: your manager is not going to tell you what to do! Your meeting will take place on Friday March 6th.
Preliminary report and first meeting with the client
You will send a preliminary report to your client, and have a short meeting to discuss it with him. This report should contain any initial results and raise any issues that you wish to discuss with the client. At the meeting, you will discuss your initial findings and seek clarification on any outstanding matters. This meeting will allow the client to check on progress and to ensure that the final deliverables will be as required. Meetings will be held March 18th-20th.
Final report and meeting with the client
You will have a second meeting with your client, at which you will present your final report and demonstrate your app. Presentation slides are not required for this meeting. Meetings will be held April 1st-3rd.
Final report
You are required to produce a detailed written report for the client presenting your analysis on their data. You should not assume the reader has any particular statistical knowledge. There is no page limit, but unnecessarily long reports may be penalised. Avoid, for example, presenting multiple different methods applied to the same data, with the expectation that the client will decide on what is most appropriate. You are required to follow the presentation guidelines as set out in the Module Handbook.
4 R Shiny app
The client should be able to use the app to implement your main analysis presented in your report (some minor aspects may be omitted, but the client should be able to use the app to come to the same main conclusions). The residential members of your group will meet again with the client to demonstrate its use. It will be tested on the two files you have been provided (you do not have to consider possible changes to the spreadsheet format in future versions). Keep the app as simple as you can! Functionality that is broadly similar to the examples in the R shiny tutorial will be sufficient.
5 Group professionalism
A small part of the assessment will be based on the professionalism of your group: would the client want to re-employ you for further work? This will be judged on your prelim- inary report (whether it helps towards a productive first meeting), how well prepared your attending group members are for the client meetings, and conduct in the client meetings themselves. (More weight given to the first two items where the majority of group members are distance learning students). Your meeting with the company manager will not be assessed.
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6 Individual portfolio
You are required to provide evidence of your contribution to the group project. Your portfolio will not be graded, but your mark for this project may be adjusted if there is not evidence of a satisfactory contribution.
• On a single page, describe your contribution to the project. The description can be brief; a list of bullet points would be fine.
• Include, as separate pdf documents or R code, evidence of your contribution as appropriate.
In addition to drafting the group report, or writing the code for the app, contribu- tions might take the form of feedback on another group member’s text or app, writing minutes/summaries of group discussions, or proposing methods for the analysis of the data.
7 Asking questions and getting help
Administrative questions about the project can be asked on MOLE. Questions to the client should only be asked at the first client meeting. You can ask your company manager questions at any time, but he is expecting the main discussion to take place at the first meeting; he expects you to work independently otherwise. You can ask questions by email (j.oakley@sheffield.ac.uk) and you should copy in all your group members.
8 Assessment
The three assessment elements and weightings are as follows
1. Final written report (70%) 2. Shiny app (20%)
3. Group professionalism (10%)
Regardless of who works on which aspects of the project, all group members are equally responsible for the entire group submission, and all members will receive the same group component grades, assuming a fair contribution to the group effort.
9 Submission
1. Leave a printed copy of your preliminary report in Jeremy’s pigeonhole by Tues- day 16th March, 12pm.
2. Submit your final report, via MOLE, as a single pdf document by Tuesday 31st March, 12pm.
3. Emailallthecodeusedtoproduceyourfinalreporttoj.oakley@sheffield.ac.uk by Tuesday 31st March, 12pm. (Send a zip file if you have multiple files to submit).
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4. Email your R shiny app code to j.oakley@sheffield.ac.uk by Tuesday 31st March, 12pm. (Send a zip file if you have multiple files to submit).
5. Submit your individual portfolio by email to j.oakley@sheffield.ac.uk Tues- day 7th April, 12pm. Email a single zip file, with the file name
MAS6006P2 your-group-letter your-student-number .zip
(e.g. MAS6002P2 B 190123456.zip)
For item 2 we require one submission per group; other group members should use the text box on the MOLE submission page to tell us which member of their group has submitted the project. You should include your group number and your student numbers on the front of all submissions but your names should not appear anywhere in the documents.
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