Data 110 DS Labs HW Assignment

Margarine vs. Divorce

A brief history: The food product was developed in the 1800’s by French chemist H. Mege Mouries with the intention of creating a spread that could replace beef tallow or butter due to shortages. It quickly became popular thtoughout Europe but when introduced to the United States, margarine faced strong opposition from the dairy industry. Margarine was viewed as a threat to their business and the dairy industry successfully lobbied for strict regulations on margarine production and sales, including a requirement that it be dyed pink to distinguish it from butter.

Is this controversial spread be wreaking havoc on the American public once again? Could margarine be a contributing factor in divorce rates in Maine?

Load libraries and data

library(dslabs)
library(tidyverse)
data("divorce_margarine")
head(divorce_margarine)

  divorce_rate_maine margarine_consumption_per_capita year
1                5.0                              8.2 2000
2                4.7                              7.0 2001
3                4.6                              6.5 2002
4                4.4                              5.3 2003
5                4.3                              5.2 2004
6                4.1                              4.0 2005

Create a scatterplot

ggplot(divorce_margarine, aes(x = margarine_consumption_per_capita, y = divorce_rate_maine, color = year)) +
  geom_point(shape = 15, size = 3) +
  geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = TRUE, aes(fill = year)) +
  labs(x = "Margarine Consumption (lbs per capita)", y = "Divorce Rate (per 1000 population)",
       title = "Margarine Consumption and Divorce Rate by Year") +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(2, 8), breaks = seq(2, 8, 2)) +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(2, 8), breaks = seq(2, 8, 2)) + 
  annotate("text", x = 3, y = 7, label = "positive\nassociation", size = 6, color = "sky blue", fontface = "bold") +
  scale_color_continuous(type = "viridis")+ 
  theme_bw() + scale_fill_discrete(name = "Year", labels = c("2000", "2001", "2002", "2003", "2004", "2005", "2006", "2007", "2008", "2009"))

I worked on the divorce_margarine dataset which was a very small, containing only 10 observations of 3 different variables. The variables given were year, divorce rate and margarine consumption per capita. I produced a scatterplot to visualize the relationship between margarine consumption and divorce rate in Maine. Each data points is colored by year from 2000-2009 and I included a trend line to show the linear relationship between divorce rate and margarine consumption. I then added an annotation to highlight the positive association between the two variables. I found to be more challenging to create plots with such a small amount of information. The process was puzzling. The resulting scatterplot suggests that there may be a relationship between margarine consumption and divorce rates in Maine.