Use the MP Track data from PRS website on the 15th Lok Sabha to show a series of visualizations that capture the state of the Indian Lok Sabha. The data is in Excel and contains several things such as the political party to which the MPs belong, their educational qualifications, age, and most interestingly their activity in parliament -- attendance, debates in which they participated, questions they raised in parliament, etc. One idea is to start with making a webpage that contains an applet for summary graphs and visualizations: State-wise histogram on the educational qualification of MPs State-wise histogram on the age of MPs State-wise histogram on the attendance of MPs State-wise histogram on the fraction of seats occupied by the leading political party in that state The same kind of histograms can also be plotted for major political parties. How will you identify "major" political parties? One idea here is to plot a graph of the size of the political party (according to number of elected MPs) against their rank and take the top 20% maybe. What does the distribution of the party size look like? You could make the webpage dynamic by allowing the user to select the state or political party, and replot the applet. It you want to get more adventurous, instead of applets you could even use one of the many Javascript libraries to plot charts, such as Google charts, YUI, etc. Some more interesting insights may be brought out by mashing the state and political parties together on the same applet visualization. An idea is to plot a map with states on the X axis and political parties on the Y axis, and colour each (x, y) square with a shade depending on the average attendance of MPs for that particular (x, y) pair of state and political party. For clarity, you can think about ordering the states in order of the number of MPs from that state, and ordering the political parties such that the largest parties for each state lie on the x=y line.  See if there are any areas in the map that stand out from the rest, ie. they are brighter or lighter, or is it all just random. A bright band along the x=y line could indicate that the largest party from a state typically maintains a good attendance in parliament, or a bright area to the left or right of the map could indicate a bias towards the larger or smaller of the states, or vertical/horizontal bands could indicate that a particular state or political party respectively maintains good attendance. You are of course open to try other ideas. Instead of squares, you could show circles with their size dependent upon the attendance. For greater clarity, you could even add filters to include only some selective political parties in the map. Feel free to use external data such as the coalition parties that clubbed to form the NDA or the UPA, etc. Instead of attendance, you could even replot the same map for educational qualifications, or questions asked in parliament, or the age of MPs. Keep in mind that the data is in Excel, so you will have port it out in a CSV or other format for external processing in Prefuse or your own scripts. In your report, you should mention any interesting trends you noticed. As before, you can then do some interesting statistical tests to demonstrate whether mathematically too you can make the same claims. In statistics, a number of hypothesis tests are available, such as the t-test, the Wald test, etc.  Hypothesis: MPs above a certain age have a low attendance. First define an age threshold and an attendance threshold, maybe based on the averages. Then draw four samples of MPs {above the threshold, below the threshold} X MPs {having high attendance, having low attendance}. Your intuition will be true if the MPs are disproportionately distributed in the quadrants {high age, low attendance} and {low age, high attendance} than in other quadrants. And you can statistically verify this using the Welch t-test on each pair of samples to compare samples with different sizes and different variances. You could even visually show this by doing a scatterplot for age and attendance of each MP. Hypothesis: MPs from small states maintain better attendance in parliament. Similar to the above, obtain samples for small states Vs large states and do a hypothesis test. Hypothesis: MPs from UPA (in power) or NDA (opposition) maintain better attendance. Hypothesis: MPs from North India maintain a better attendance than MPs from South India. Hypothesis: More educated MPs maintain better attendance. Hypothesis: Female MPs are better educated than male MPs. Your main goal in the visualization part of the assignment should be to allow exploration and mashup of different parameters together. And the main goal in the statistics part should be to mathematically describe any interesting trends you have spotted in the visualizations.