Experimental Design Capstone: Do free ad-enabled apps get lower ratings than paid apps?

This is my capstone project on experimental design for Thinkful’s Data Science Flex program. For this capstone we were to complete a buisness research project. Steps involved

Write a research proposal
Run a hypothesis test, analyze and write up results
Create a power point presentation

Included in this repository

The research proposal, https://github.com/mathisme/ThinkfulDSCapstone1/blob/main/Thinkful%20Research%20Proposal.pdf
Jupyter notebook containing the results, https://github.com/mathisme/ThinkfulDSCapstone1/blob/main/Results.ipynb
PowerPoint presentation, https://github.com/mathisme/ThinkfulDSCapstone1/blob/main/ThinkfulDSCap1.pptx

Background

As someone who uses apps and gets annoyed by all the advertisements popping up in free apps, I was curious to see if free ad-enabled apps get lower ratings on average than paid apps without ads. To examine thiis, I chose the Google Play Store Apps dataset found on Kaggle. The dataset can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/gauthamp10/google-playstore-apps Although this is not for any buisness purpose, developers can see from my research that having ads does not significantly effect user ratings.

Steps

An exploratory data analysis was performed on the data
As a t-test was to be used, the ratings column needed to be transformed to make it more normal
A/A testing was used to test for bias
A one sided t-test was performed and results analyzed
To derive a confidence interval on the non-transformed 'ratings' column, bootstrapping was utilized

Tools Used

Numpy
Pandas
Scipy
Matplotlib

To do in the future

Find data on user reviews and see if ads effect review sentiment