A Wealth of Data

Background:

In the online marketplace it created, Amazon provides customers with an opportunity to rate and review purchases. Individual ratings - called "star ratings" - allow purchasers to express their level of satisfaction with a product using a scale of 1 (low rated, low satisfaction) to 5 (highly rated, high satisfaction). Additionally, customers can submit text-based messages - called "reviews" - that express further opinions and information about the product. Other customers can submit ratings on these reviews as being helpful or not - called a "helpfulness rating" - towards assisting their own product purchasing decision. Companies use these data to gain insights into the markets in which they participate, the timing of that participation, and the potential success of product design feature choices.

Sunshine Company is planning to introduce and sell three new products in the online marketplace: a microwave oven, a baby pacifier, and a hair dryer. They have hired your team as consultants to identify key patterns, relationships, measures, and parameters in past customer-supplied ratings and reviews associated with other competing products to 1) inform their online sales strategy and 2) identify potentially important design features that would enhance product desirability. Sunshine Company has used data to inform sales strategies in the past, but they have not previously used this particular combination and type of data. Of particular interest to Sunshine Companyare time-based patterns in these data, and whether they interact in ways that will help the company craft successful products.

To assist you, Sunshine's data center has provided you with three data files for this project: hair_dryer.tsv, microwave.tsv, and pacifier.tsv. These data represent customer-supplied ratings and reviews for microwave ovens, baby pacifiers, and hair dryers sold in the Amazon marketplace over the time period(s) indicated in the data. A glossary of data label definitions is provided as well. THE DATA FILES PROVIDED CONTAIN THE ONLY DATA YOU SHOULD USE FOR THIS PROBLEM.