Sentiment analysis of movie reviews: You could collect a dataset of movie reviews with sentiment ratings (positive, negative) and build a text classification model in Python using NLP techniques to predict the sentiment of new reviews. The goal would be to accurately classify reviews as positive or negative sentiment. Some popular datasets for this are the IMDB dataset or Stanford’s Large Movie Review Dataset.
Predicting housing prices: You could obtain a dataset of housing sales with features like location, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, square footage, age of home etc. and build a regression model in Python like LinearRegression or RandomForestRegressor to predict future housing prices based on property details. Popular datasets for this include King County home sales data or Boston housing data.
Movie recommendation system: Collect a movie rating dataset where users have rated movies. Build collaborative filtering models in Python like Matrix Factorization to predict movie ratings for users and recommend unseen movies. Popular datasets include the MovieLens dataset. You could create a web app for users to log in and see personalized movie recommendations.
Stock market prediction: Obtain stock price data for companies over time along with other financial data. Engineer features and build classification or regression models in Python to predict stock price movements or trends. For example, predict if the stock price will be up or down on the next day. Popular datasets include Yahoo Finance stock data.
Credit card fraud detection: Obtain a credit card transaction dataset with labels indicating fraudulent or legitimate transactions. Engineer relevant features from the raw data and build classification models in Python to detect potentially fraudulent transactions. The goal is to accurately detect fraud while minimizing false positives. Popular datasets are the Kaggle credit card fraud detection datasets.
Customer churn prediction: Get customer data from a telecom or other subscription-based company including customer details, services used, payment history etc. Engineer relevant features and build classification models in Python to predict the likelihood of a customer churning i.e. cancelling their service. The goal is to target high-risk customers for retention programs.
Employee attrition prediction: Obtain employee records data from an HR department including demographics, job details, salary, performance ratings etc. Build classification models to predict the probability of an employee leaving the company. Insights can help focus retention efforts for at-risk employees.
E-commerce product recommendations: Collect e-commerce customer purchase histories and product metadata. Build recommendation models to suggest additional products customers might be interested in based on their purchase history and similar customers’ purchases. Popular datasets include Amazon product co-purchases data.
Travel destination recommendation: Get a dataset with customer travel histories, destination details, reviews etc. Engineer features around interests, demographics, past destinations visited to build recommendation models to suggest new destinations tailored for each customer.
Image classification: Obtain a dataset of labeled images for a classification task like recognizing common objects, animals etc. Build convolutional neural network models in Python using frameworks like Keras/TensorFlow to build very accurate image classifiers. Popular datasets include CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 for objects, MS COCO for objects in context.
Natural language processing tasks like sentiment analysis, topic modeling, named entity recognition etc. can also be applied to various text corpora like news articles, social media posts, product reviews and more to gain useful insights.
These are some ideas that could be implemented as data analytics projects using Python and freely available public datasets. The goal is to apply machine learning techniques with an understandable business problem or use case in mind. With projects like these, students can gain hands-on experience in the entire workflow from data collection/wrangling to model building, evaluation and potentially basic deployment.