Sobey School of Business Professor Dr. Matthew Boland and Master of Business Analytics students Tasneem Quazi and Rahul Kashyap.
Earlier this year, professor Matthew Boland and a team of graduate research assistants at Saint Mary’s University embarked on a new data analytics project.
Armed with open data from the Nova Scotia government, the team had a simple but shared goal—to use that data to better the lives of Nova Scotians.
“It's really important to try to make some local impact” - Matthew Boland.
Boland is an accounting professor at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary's University. He created the project for his students in the Master of Business Analytics program to show the local importance of data analytics.
“It's really important to try to make some local impact,” says Boland. “That's what this project was about for me and our students.”
The inspiration for the project struck last year when Boland stumbled across the Nova Scotia Open Data Portal. This website was launched in 2016 to make government data more accessible to the public. It includes information on everything from crime statistics to Crown land in the province.
The website presented an opportunity for Boland, who specializes in advanced data analytics. Although the Open Data Portal is available for free to everyone, he knew most people wouldn’t have the time or resources needed to make sense of the data.
He decided to bring the website to his students.
“I asked them to start looking through the data…and think about a research question that this data could answer that would be of interest to Nova Scotians,” says Boland, who is from Berwick in the Annapolis Valley.
Boland invited the students to use that data to study topics of their choosing, so long as they related to the province. He also asked students to combine their data with other available data sets to find new insights into these topics.
The resulting studies covered a range of issues. One used data on fishing and aquaculture to predict the migratory patterns of invasive fish species in the province. Another looked at the relationship between air pollution and rates of asthma in Nova Scotia counties.
Boland says he hopes these studies will help lawmakers and regulators find new ways to safeguard health and well-being in the province—from protecting native fish to keeping the air clean.
The students plan to make their findings and methodologies available for free to the public. Those interested will be able to use the code the students created to analyze the data, allowing them to replicate the study.
Boland’s project is happening amidst a larger push toward better data analytics solutions in the province. In March, the Nova Scotia government announced it would spend $25 million to expand healthcare data analytics and management programs at Saint Mary's.
Moving forward, Boland’s project will be formalized as a class offered to graduate students. He hopes it will inspire others to pursue their own research, using data analytics to better the world around them.
“If some of this someday could help inform regulation or just be one small piece to a larger puzzle that helps…I think that would be pretty awesome,” says Boland.