Technical Assessment

Introduction:

Hello! Welcome to the Open Cities Lab $($OCL$)$ data technical assessment. This assignment is intended to help you demonstrate your skills and for us to get a sense of how you think about and approach data$-$driven problem solving and decision$-$making.

At OCL, there is as much a focus on the empathetic, real$-$world usage of data as the leveraging of cutting$-$edge, hyper$-$accurate methods and models. Accordingly, we are as interested in how you frame and contextualize the problem as we are in your ability to use advanced data science and machine learning algorithms. So$,$ please don$$t hold back in letting us know why you did what you did at each step, any challenges you identify, concerns that you have in the problem statements, potential biases in the source data, and how you would augment the data provided with other sources if you had the chance. All the best!

Source Data:

You have been provided $($link$)$ with several datasets containing information indexed with StatsSA$$s Small Area Layer $($SAL$)$ codes, as well as complementary geospatial data.

Task $1$: Preprocessing, Data Exploration and Visualization

$$ Clean up any data files that contain extraneous information.

$$ Handle missing values if any.

$$ Encode categorical variables if necessary.

$$ Normalize or standardize numerical features if required.

$$ Perform an exploratory data analysis to understand the structure and properties of the datasets.

$$ Visualize important features and relationships in the data using appropriate plots and charts.