LendingClubis a peer-to-peer marketplace where borrowers and investors are matched together. The goal ofLendingClubis to reduce the costs associated with these banking transactions and make borrowing less expensive and investment more engaging.LendingClubprovides data on loans that have been approved and rejected since 2007, including the assigned interest rate and type of loan. This provides several opportunities for data analysis.

Calculate Summary Statistics in Excel

We use Excel for basic validation. Remember, there is a limitation on the number of records that Excel can handle, so this is best for smaller- to medium-sized files. Excel's toolbar at the bottom of the window provides quick access to a summary of any selected values.

1. Open your web browser and go to:https://www.lendingclub.com/info/download-data.action(Links to an external site.)
2. .
3. In theDownload Loan Datasection, choose "2015"from the drop-down list, then clickDownload.
4. Locate your downloaded zip files on your computer, and extract the .csv files to a convenient location (e.g., desktop or Documents).
5. Open theLoanStats3c.csvfile in Excel.
6. Select the[loan_amnt]column. At the bottom of the window, you will see theAverage,Count, andSumcalculations, shown inLAB Exhibit 2-4A(Links to an external site.)
7. . Compare those to the validation given byLendingClub:

• Funded loans: $3,503,840,175
• Number of approved loans: 235,629

Q1.Does the numbers match the numbers provided byLendingClub? What explains the discrepancy, if any?

1. Right-click on thesummarytoolbar and chooseNumerical Countfrom the list. You should now see four values in the bar.

Q2.Does the Numerical Count provide a more useful/accurate value for validating your data? Why or why not do you think that is the case?

1. Q3.What other summary values might be useful for validating your data?