Tristan-big-data

• Examining Trends in a Performance Sport
• Data set: WCA Database

Question

What can we discover about how people improve in a field over time? To explore this I looked through the World Cubing Association database. A database with tens of thousands of Rubik's cube solves for thousands of people.

Project Tasks

-Identifying and downloading the target data set

The WCA Dataset was easily downloaded as a set of SQL inserts. The file can be downloaded from here.

-Data cleaning and pre-processing

The issue was that the .sql file was in MS-SQL or OracleSQL, so some mass modifications to the file had to be made. Primarily it was with changing smallint(n) to int, and `tablename` without the `.

-Load the data into your Postgres instance

It took a few times to get everything from the script all working, but the script was successfully run on my directory on BigFe.

1. Develop queries to explore your ideas in the data

People with more than 100 3x3 averages of 5.

<syntaxhighlight lang="sql"> SELECT personname, count(average) FROM results WHERE eventid = '333' GROUP BY personname HAVING count(average) > 100 ORDER BY count(average); }</syntaxhighlight>

1. Develop and document the model function you are exploring in the data

1. Develop a visualization to show the model/patterns in the data

Tech Details

• Node: as3
• Path to storage space: /scratch/big-data/tristan

Results

• The visualization(s)
• The story