This project started from a personal curiosity. I study data science with a strong interest in psychology and decision economics — the way mood, environment and macroeconomic pressure quietly shape the everyday choices people make. I wanted to move past intuition and look at whether those forces actually leave a measurable trace in real data. So I built a country-level monthly panel covering Germany, Spain, Turkey and the UK, and asked the question quantitatively: do sunshine, temperature and macro context shift consumer confidence and retail behavior in ways I can actually detect?
Why data science?
I wanted this project to do more than just visualise the question. Answering it properly meant integrating four public data sources, making cleaning decisions transparent, running formal hypothesis tests, building predictive models and being honest about what the numbers cannot tell me. That full pipeline — not any single chart — is what convinced me the answer is more nuanced than the intuition I started with.
The questions I started with
- Does same-month sunshine correlate with consumer confidence?
- Does last month's weather predict this month's mood?
- Do summer and winter consumer confidence systematically differ?
- Can non-linear ML models recover signals that linear methods miss?
- Is consumer perception or consumer behavior more responsive to weather?
- Can countries be grouped by climate-driven consumer profiles?
These questions guide my curiosity. The evidence and model pages focus on sunshine–confidence associations, geographic and trend sensitivity, and calendar-based prediction. Broader questions about lagged weather, seasons and country profiles remain avenues for further study.
What I want to understand
I want to connect my interest in human decisions with evidence I can examine and question. Consumer confidence offers one window into economic sentiment, while retail data describes spending behavior. Neither directly measures an individual's mood or psychology, so the distinction matters when interpreting the results.