13 Ultimate Big Data Project Ideas & Topics for Beginners [2023]

Big Data Project Ideas

Big Data is an exciting subject. It helps you find patterns and results you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. This skill highly in demand, and you can quickly advance your career by learning it. So, if you are a big data beginner, the best thing you can do is work on some big data project ideas. But it can be difficult for a beginner to find suitable big data topics as they aren’t very familiar with the subject. 

We, here at upGrad, believe in a practical approach as theoretical knowledge alone won’t be of help in a real-time work environment. In this article, we will be exploring some interesting big data project ideas which beginners can work on to put their big data knowledge to test. In this article, you will find top big data project ideas for beginners to get hands-on experience on big data

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However, knowing the theory of big data alone won’t help you much. You’ll need to practice what you’ve learned.
But how would you do that?

You can practice your big data skills on big data projects. Projects are a great way to test your skills. They are also great for your CV. Especially big data research projects and data processing projects are something that will help you understand the whole of the subject most efficiently. 

Read: Big data career path

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What are the areas where big data analytics is used?

Before jumping into the list of  big data topics that you can try out as a beginner, you need to understand the areas of application of the subject. This will help you invent your own topics for data processing projects once you complete a few from the list. Hence, let’s see what are the areas where big data analytics is used the most. This will help you navigate how to identify issues in certain industries and how they can be resolved with the help of big data as big data research projects.

1. Banking and Safety:

The banking industry often deals with cases of card fraud, security fraud, ticks and such other issues that greatly hamper their functioning as well as market reputation. Hence to tackle that, the securities exchange commission aka SEC takes the help of big data and monitors the financial market activity. 

This has further helped them manage a safer environment for highly valuable customers like retail traders, hedge funds, big banks and other eminent individuals in the financial market. Big data has helped this industry in the cases like anti-money laundering, fraud mitigation, demand enterprise risk management and other cases of risk analytics. 

2. Media and Entertainment industry

It is needless to say that the media and entertainment industry heavily depends on the verdict of the consumers and this is why they are always required to put up their best game. For that, they require to understand the current trends and demands of the public, which is also something that changes rapidly these days.

To get an in-depth understanding of consumer behaviour and their needs, the media and entertainment industry collects, analyses and utilises customer insights. They leverage mobile and social media content to understand the patterns at a real-time speed. 

The industry leverages Big data to run detailed sentiment analysis to pitch the perfect content to the users. Some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry such as Spotify and Amazon Prime are known for using big data to provide accurate content recommendations to their users, which helps them improve their customer satisfaction and, therefore, increases customer retention. 

3. Healthcare Industry

Even though the healthcare industry generates huge volumes of data on a daily basis which can be ustilised in many ways to improve the healthcare industry, it fails to utilise it completely due to issues of usability of it. Yet there is a significant number of areas where the healthcare industry is continuously utilising Big Data.

The main area where the healthcare industry is actively leveraging big data is to improve hospital administration so that patients can revoke best-in-class clinical support. Apart from that, Big Data is also used in fighting lethal diseases like cancer. Big Data has also helped the industry to save itself from potential frauds and committing usual man-made errors like providing the wrong dosage, medicine etc. 

4. Education

Similar to the society that we live in, the education system is also evolving. Especially after the pandemic hit hard, the change became even more rapid. With the introduction of remote learning, the education system transformed drastically, and so did its problems.

On that note, Big Data significantly came in handy, as it helped educational institutions to get the insights that can be used to take the right decisions suitable for the circumstances. Big Data helped educators to understand the importance of creating a unique and customised curriculum to fight issues like students not being able to retain attention. 

It not only helped improve the educational system but to identify the student’s strengths and channeled them right. 

5. Government and Public Services

Likewise the field of government and public services itself, the applications of Big Data by them are also extensive and diverse. Government leverages big data mostly in areas like financial market analysis, fraud detection, energy resource exploration, environment protection, public-health-related research and so forth. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) actively uses Big Data to study food-related illnesses and disease patterns. 

6. Retail and Wholesale Industry

In spite of having tons of data available online in form of reviews, customer loyalty cards, RFID etc. the retail and wholesale industry is still lacking in making complete use of it. These insights hold great potential to change the game of customer experience and customer loyalty. 

Especially after the emergence of e-commerce, big data is used by companies to create custom recommendations based on their previous purchasing behaviour or even from their search history. 

In the case of brick-and-mortar stores as well, big data is used for monitoring store-level demand in real-time so that it can be ensured that the best-selling items remain in stock. Along with that, in the case of this industry, data is also helpful in improving the entire value chain to increase profits.  

7. Manufacturing and Resources Industry

The demand for resources of every kind and manufactured product is only increasing with time which is making it difficult for industries to cope. However, there are large volumes of data from these industries that are untapped and hold the potential to make both industries more efficient, profitable and manageable. 

By integrating large volumes of geospatial and geographical data available online, better predictive analysis can be done to find the best areas for natural resource explorations. Similarly, in the case of the manufacturing industry, Big Data can help solve several issues regarding the supply chain and provide companies with a competitive edge. 

8. Insurance Industry 

The insurance industry is anticipated to be the highest profit-making industry but its vast and diverse customer base makes it difficult for it to incorporate state-of-the-art requirements like personalized services, personalised prices and targeted services. To tackle these prime challenges Big Data plays a huge part.

Big data helps this industry to gain customer insights that further help in curating simple and transparent products that match the recruitment of the customers. Along with that, big data also helps the industry analyse and predict customer behaviours and results in the best decision-making for insurance companies. Apart from predictive analytics, big data is also utilised in fraud detection. 

How do you create a big data project?

Creating a big data project involves several key steps and considerations. Here’s a general outline to guide you through the process:

• Define Objectives: Clearly define the objectives and goals of your big data project. Identify the business problems you want to solve or the insights you aim to gain from the data.

• Data Collection: Determine the sources of data you need for your project. It could be structured data from databases, unstructured data from social media or text documents, or semi-structured data from log files or XML. Plan how you will collect and store this data.

• Data Storage: Choose a suitable storage solution for your data. Depending on the volume and variety of data, you may consider traditional databases, data lakes, or distributed file systems like Hadoop HDFS.

• Data Processing: Determine how you will process and manage your big data. This step usually involves data cleaning, transformation, and integration. Technologies like Apache Spark or Apache Hadoop MapReduce are commonly used for large-scale data processing.

• Data Analysis: Perform exploratory data analysis to gain insights and understand patterns within the data. Use data visualization tools to present the findings.

• Implement Algorithms: If your project involves machine learning or advanced analytics, implement relevant algorithms to extract meaningful information from the data.

• Performance Optimization: Big data projects often face performance challenges. Optimize your data processing pipelines, algorithms, and infrastructure for efficiency and scalability.

• Data Security and Privacy: Ensure that your project adheres to data security and privacy regulations. Implement proper data access controls and anonymization techniques if needed.

• Deploy and Monitor: Deploy your big data project in a production environment and set up monitoring to track its performance and identify any issues.

• Evaluate Results: Continuously evaluate the results of your big data project against the defined objectives. Refine and improve your approach based on feedback and insights gained from the project.

• Documentation: Thoroughly document each step of the project, including data sources, data processing steps, analysis methodologies, and algorithms used. This documentation will be valuable for future reference and for collaborating with others.

• Team Collaboration: Big data projects often involve collaboration between various teams, such as data engineers, data scientists, domain experts, and IT professionals. Effective communication and collaboration are crucial for the success of the project.

What problems you might face in doing Big Data Projects

Big data is present in numerous industries. So you’ll find a wide variety of big data project topics to work on too.

Apart from the wide variety of project ideas, there are a bunch of challenges a big data analyst faces while working on such projects.

They are the following:

Limited Monitoring Solutions

You can face problems while monitoring real-time environments because there aren’t many solutions available for this purpose.

That’s why you should be familiar with the technologies you’ll need to use in big data analysis before you begin working on a project.

Timing Issues

A common problem among data analysis is of output latency during data virtualization. Most of these tools require high-level performance, which leads to these latency problems.

Due to the latency in output generation, timing issues arise with the virtualization of data.

The requirement of High-level Scripting

When working on big data analytics projects, you might encounter tools or problems which require higher-level scripting than you’re familiar with.

In that case, you should try to learn more about the problem and ask others about the same.

Data Privacy and Security

While working on the data available to you, you have to ensure that all the data remains secure and private.

Leakage of data can wreak havoc to your project as well as your work. Sometimes users leak data too, so you have to keep that in mind.

Knowledge Read: Big data jobs & Career planning

Unavailability of Tools

You can’t do end-to-end testing with just one tool. You should figure out which tools you will need to use to complete a specific project.

When you don’t have the right tool at a specific device, it can waste a lot of time and cause a lot of frustration.

That is why you should have the required tools before you start the project.

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Too Big Datasets

You can come across a dataset which is too big for you to handle. Or, you might need to verify more data to complete the project as well.

Make sure that you update your data regularly to solve this problem. It’s also possible that your data has duplicates, so you should remove them, as well.

While working on big data projects, keep in mind the following points to solve these challenges:

•         Use the right combination of hardware as well as software tools to make sure your work doesn’t get hampered later on due to the lack of the same.
•         Check your data thoroughly and get rid of any duplicates.
•         Follow Machine Learning approaches for better efficiency and results.
•         What are the technologies you’ll need to use in Big Data Analytics Projects:

We recommend the following technologies for beginner-level big data projects:

•         Open-source databases
•         C++, Python
•         Cloud solutions (such as Azure and AWS)
•         SAS
•         R (programming language)
•         Tableau
•         PHP and Javascript

Each of these technologies will help you with a different sector. For example, you will need to use cloud solutions for data storage and access.

On the other hand, you will need to use R for using data science tools. These are all the problems you need to face and fix when you work on big data project ideas. 

If you are not familiar with any of the technologies we mentioned above, you should learn about the same before working on a project. The more big data project ideas you try, the more experience you gain.

Otherwise, you’d be prone to making a lot of mistakes which you could’ve easily avoided.

So, here are a few Big Data Project ideas which beginners can work on:

Read: Career in big data and its scope.

Big Data Project Ideas: Beginners Level

This list of big data project ideas for students is suited for beginners, and those just starting out with big data. These big data project ideas will get you going with all the practicalities you need to succeed in your career as a big data developer.

Further, if you’re looking for big data project ideas for final year, this list should get you going. So, without further ado, let’s jump straight into some big data project ideas that will strengthen your base and allow you to climb up the ladder.

We know how challenging it is to find the right project ideas as a beginner. You don’t know what you should be working on, and you don’t see how it will benefit you.

That’s why we have prepared the following list of big data projects so you can start working on them: Let’s start with big data project ideas.

Fun Big Data Project Ideas

• Social Media Trend Analysis: Gather data from various platforms and analyze trends, topics, and sentiment.

• Music Recommender System: Build a personalized music recommendation engine based on user preferences.

• Video Game Analytics: Analyze gaming data to identify patterns and player behavior.

• Real-time Traffic Analysis: Use data to create visualizations and optimize traffic routes.

• Energy Consumption Optimization: Analyze energy usage data to propose energy-saving strategies.

• Predicting Box Office Success: Develop a model to predict movie success based on various factors.

• Food Recipe Recommendation: Recommend recipes based on dietary preferences and history.

• Wildlife Tracking and Conservation: Use big data to track and monitor wildlife for conservation efforts.

• Fashion Trend Analysis: Analyze fashion data to identify trends and popular styles.

• Online Gaming Community Analysis: Understand player behavior and social interactions in gaming communities.

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1. Classify 1994 Census Income Data

One of the best ideas to start experimenting you hands-on big data projects for students is working on this project. You will have to build a model to predict if the income of an individual in the US is more or less than $50,000 based on the data available.

A person’s income depends on a lot of factors, and you’ll have to take into account every one of them.

You can find the data for this project here.

2. Analyze Crime Rates in Chicago

Law enforcement agencies take the help of big data to find patterns in the crimes taking place. Doing this helps the agencies in predicting future events and helps them in mitigating the crime rates.

You will have to find patterns, create models, and then validate your model.

You can get the data for this project here.

3. Text Mining Project

This is one of the excellent deep learning project ideas for beginners. Text mining is in high demand, and it will help you a lot in showcasing your strengths as a data scientist. In this project, you will have to perform text analysis and visualization of the provided documents.  

You will have to use Natural Language Process Techniques for this task.

You can get the data here.

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Big Data Project Ideas: Advanced Level

4. Big Data for cybersecurity

This project will investigate the long-term and time-invariant dependence relationships in large volumes of data. The main aim of this Big Data project is to combat real-world cybersecurity problems by exploiting vulnerability disclosure trends with complex multivariate time series data. This cybersecurity project seeks to establish an innovative and robust statistical framework to help you gain an in-depth understanding of the disclosure dynamics and their intriguing dependence structures.

5. Health status prediction

This is one of the interesting big data project ideas. This Big Data project is designed to predict the health status based on massive datasets. It will involve the creation of a machine learning model that can accurately classify users according to their health attributes to qualify them as having or not having heart diseases. Decision trees are the best machine learning method for classification, and hence, it is the ideal prediction tool for this project. The feature selection approach will help enhance the classification accuracy of the ML model.

6. Anomaly detection in cloud servers

In this project, an anomaly detection approach will be implemented for streaming large datasets. The proposed project will detect anomalies in cloud servers by leveraging two core algorithms – state summarization and novel nested-arc hidden semi-Markov model (NAHSMM). While state summarization will extract usage behaviour reflective states from raw sequences, NAHSMM will create an anomaly detection algorithm with a forensic module to obtain the normal behaviour threshold in the training phase.

7. Recruitment for Big Data job profiles

Recruitment is a challenging job responsibility of the HR department of any company. Here, we’ll create a Big Data project that can analyze vast amounts of data gathered from real-world job posts published online. The project involves three steps:

• Identify four Big Data job families in the given dataset.
• Identify nine homogeneous groups of Big Data skills that are highly valued by companies. 
• Characterize each Big Data job family according to the level of competence required for each Big Data skill set.

The goal of this project is to help the HR department find better recruitments for Big Data job roles.

8. Malicious user detection in Big Data collection

This is one of the trending deep learning project ideas. When talking about Big Data collections, the trustworthiness (reliability) of users is of supreme importance. In this project, we will calculate the reliability factor of users in a given Big Data collection. To achieve this, the project will divide the trustworthiness into familiarity and similarity trustworthiness. Furthermore, it will divide all the participants into small groups according to the similarity trustworthiness factor and then calculate the trustworthiness of each group separately to reduce the computational complexity. This grouping strategy allows the project to represent the trust level of a particular group as a whole. 

9. Tourist behaviour analysis

This is one of the excellent big data project ideas. This Big Data project is designed to analyze the tourist behaviour to identify tourists’ interests and most visited locations and accordingly, predict future tourism demands. The project involves four steps: 

• Textual metadata processing to extract a list of interest candidates from geotagged pictures. 
• Geographical data clustering to identify popular tourist locations for each of the identified tourist interests. 
• Representative photo identification for each tourist interest. 
• Time series modelling to construct a time series data by counting the number of tourists on a monthly basis. 

10. Credit Scoring

This project seeks to explore the value of Big Data for credit scoring. The primary idea behind this project is to investigate the performance of both statistical and economic models. To do so, it will use a unique combination of datasets that contains call-detail records along with the credit and debit account information of customers for creating appropriate scorecards for credit card applicants. This will help to predict the creditworthiness of credit card applicants.

11. Electricity price forecasting

This is one of the interesting big data project ideas. This project is explicitly designed to forecast electricity prices by leveraging Big Data sets. The model exploits the SVM classifier to predict the electricity price. However, during the training phase in SVM classification, the model will include even the irrelevant and redundant features which reduce its forecasting accuracy. To address this problem, we will use two methods – Grey Correlation Analysis (GCA) and Principle Component Analysis. These methods help select important features while eliminating all the unnecessary elements, thereby improving the classification accuracy of the model.

12. BusBeat

BusBeat is an early event detection system that utilizes GPS trajectories of periodic-cars travelling routinely in an urban area. This project proposes data interpolation and the network-based event detection techniques to implement early event detection with GPS trajectory data successfully. The data interpolation technique helps to recover missing values in the GPS data using the primary feature of the periodic-cars, and the network analysis estimates an event venue location.

13. Yandex.Traffic

Yandex.Traffic was born when Yandex decided to use its advanced data analysis skills to develop an app that can analyze information collected from multiple sources and display a real-time map of traffic conditions in a city.

After collecting large volumes of data from disparate sources, Yandex.Traffic analyses the data to map accurate results on a particular city’s map via Yandex.Maps, Yandex’s web-based mapping service. Not just that, Yandex.Traffic can also calculate the average level of congestion on a scale of 0 to 10 for large cities with serious traffic jam issues. Yandex.Traffic sources information directly from those who create traffic to paint an accurate picture of traffic congestion in a city, thereby allowing drivers to help one another.

Additional Topics

•         Predicting effective missing data by using Multivariable Time Series on Apache Spark
•         Confidentially preserving big data paradigm and detecting collaborative spam
•         Predict mixed type multi-outcome by using the paradigm in healthcare application
•         Use an innovative MapReduce mechanism and scale Big HDT Semantic Data Compression
•         Model medical texts for Distributed Representation (Skip Gram Approach based)

Learn: Mapreduce in big data

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Conclusion

In this article, we have covered top big data project ideas. We started with some beginner projects which you can solve with ease. Once you finish with these simple projects, I suggest you go back, learn a few more concepts and then try the intermediate projects. When you feel confident, you can then tackle the advanced projects. If you wish to improve your big data skills, you need to get your hands on these big data project ideas.

Working on big data projects will help you find your strong and weak points. Completing these projects will give you real-life experience of working as a data scientist.

If you are interested to know more about Big Data, check out our Advanced Certificate Programme in Big Data from IIIT Bangalore.

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