Sunday 26 August 2012

Kaggle Prospect - Harvard Business Review

This post is meant for submitting visual analysis for the Harvard Business Review Contest on Kaggle

I used the subject lines for all the articles and all the years and mapped the articles into one of the following 18 categories


  1.  Business Ethics
  2.  Business Management
  3.  Crisis
  4.  Emerging Markets
  5.  Financial Performance
  6.  Health Care
  7.  Information Technology
  8.  Labor
  9.  Leadership
  10.  Management Systems
  11.  Marketing Strategy
  12.  Regulation
  13.  Social Media
  14.  Stock Market
  15.  Strategic Planning
  16.  Supply Chain
  17.  United States & World
  18.  Women & Management


Changes in popularity of these topics were visualized using the googleVis package for R. This visualization is available here (I could not figure out how to upload it on Kaggle).

Observations:


  1. The average number of pages per article has gone down steadily since the 1950s falling to below 5 pages per article in for the first time in 1981 and then staying pretty much below that mark. Could this partly be attributed to the internet revolution?
  2. Recent trending topics are related to Emerging Markets & China, and Social Media.
  3. Some evergreen topics in HBR include - Business Management, Employees/Workforce, Labor, Marketing Strategy, and Strategic Planning.
  4. The lengthiest articles are on issues concerning United States & the World, Regulation and Management Systems