Airquality Assignment

Author

Rachel Saidi

Published

May 5, 2023

Airquality Tutorial and Homework Assignment

Load in the library

Because airquality is a pre-built dataset, we can write it to our data directory to store it for later use.

The source for this dataset is the New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service of 1973 for five months from May to September recorded daily.

library(tidyverse)

Load the dataset into your global environment

data("airquality")

Look at the structure of the data

the function, head, will only disply the first 6 rows of the dataset. Notice in the global environment to the right, there are 153 observations (rows)

View the data using the “head” function

head(airquality)

  Ozone Solar.R Wind Temp Month Day
1    41     190  7.4   67     5   1
2    36     118  8.0   72     5   2
3    12     149 12.6   74     5   3
4    18     313 11.5   62     5   4
5    NA      NA 14.3   56     5   5
6    28      NA 14.9   66     5   6

Calculate Summary Statistics

If you want to look at specific statistics, here are some variations on coding. Here are 2 different ways to calculate “mean.”

mean(airquality$Wind)

[1] 9.957516

sd(airquality$Wind)

[1] 3.523001

Calculate Median, Standard Deviation, and Variance

median(airquality$Temp)

[1] 79

sd(airquality$Wind)

[1] 3.523001

var(airquality$Wind)

[1] 12.41154

Rename the Months from number to names

Number 5 - 9 to May through September

airquality$Month[airquality$Month == 5]<- "May"
airquality$Month[airquality$Month == 6]<- "June"
airquality$Month[airquality$Month == 7]<- "July"
airquality$Month[airquality$Month == 8]<- "August"
airquality$Month[airquality$Month == 9]<- "September"

Now look at the summary statistics of the dataset

See how Month has changed to have characters instead of numbers

summary(airquality$Month)

   Length     Class      Mode 
      153 character character

Month is a categorical variable with different levels, called factors.

This is one way to reorder the Months so they do not default to alphabetical (you will see another way to reorder DIRECTLY in the chunk that creates the plot below in Plot 1)

airquality$Month<-factor(airquality$Month, levels=c("May", "June","July", "August", "September"))

Plot 1: Create a histogram categorized by Month

Here is a first attempt at viewing a histogram of temperature by the months May through September. We will see that temperatures increase over these months. The median temperature appears to be about 75 degrees.

Reorder the legend so that it is not the default (alphabetical), but rather in chronological order.

fill = Month colors the histogram by months between May - Sept.

scale_fill_discrete(name = “Month”…) provides the month names on the right side as a legend.

p1 <- airquality |>
  ggplot(aes(x=Temp, fill=Month)) +
  geom_histogram(position="identity")+
  scale_fill_discrete(name = "Month", 
                      labels = c("May", "June","July", "August", "September")) +
  labs(x = "Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept", 
       y = "Frequency of Temps",
       title = "Histogram of Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept, 1973",
       caption = "New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service")  #provide the data source
p1

`stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.

Is this plot useful in answering questions about monthly temperature values?

Plot 2: Improve the histogram using ggplot

Outline the bars in white using the color = “white” command

Use alpha to add some transparency (values between 0 and 1)

Change the binwidth

Histogram of Average Temperature by Month

Add some transparency and white borders around the histogram bars. Here July stands out for having high frequency of 85 degree temperatures. The dark purple color indicates overlaps of months due to the transparency.

p2 <- airquality |>
  ggplot(aes(x=Temp, fill=Month)) +
  geom_histogram(position="identity", alpha=0.5, binwidth = 5, color = "white")+
  scale_fill_discrete(name = "Month", labels = c("May", "June","July", "August", "September")) +
  labs(x = "Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept", 
       y = "Frequency of Temps",
       title = "Histogram of Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept, 1973",
       caption = "New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service")
p2

Did this improve the readability of the plot?

Plot 3: Create side-by-side boxplots categorized by Month

We can see that August has the highest temperatures based on the boxplot distribution.

p3 <- airquality |>
  ggplot(aes(Month, Temp, fill = Month)) + 
  labs(x = "Months from May through September", y = "Temperatures", 
       title = "Side-by-Side Boxplot of Monthly Temperatures",
       caption = "New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service") +
  geom_boxplot() +
  scale_fill_discrete(name = "Month", labels = c("May", "June","July", "August", "September"))
p3

Notice that the points above and below the boxplots in June and July are outliers.

Plot 4: Make the same side-by-side boxplots, but in grey-scale

Use the scale_fill_grey command for the grey-scale legend, and again, use fill=Month in the aesthetics

Side by Side Boxplots in Gray Scale

Here we just changed the color palette to gray scale using scale_fill_grey

p4 <- airquality |>
  ggplot(aes(Month, Temp, fill = Month)) + 
  labs(x = "Monthly Temperatures", y = "Temperatures", 
       title = "Side-by-Side Boxplot of Monthly Temperatures",
       caption = "New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service") +
  geom_boxplot()+
  scale_fill_grey(name = "Month", labels = c("May", "June","July", "August", "September"))
p4

Plot 5: Now make one plot on your own of any of the variables in this dataset. It may be a scatterplot, histogram, or boxplot.

airquality |> 
  ggplot(aes(x = Wind, y = Temp))+
  geom_point(aes(col="red", size =3))+
  geom_smooth(span=0.6)

`geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula = 'y ~ x'

Be sure to write a brief essay that describes the plot you have created, what the plot shows, and what code you used to make this modification.

I created a scatter plot using geom_point which shows the relationship between temperature and wind. This plot shows a negative correlation betwee temperature and wind. As temperature goes down, the wind speed picks up.

I used ggplot to make the wind my x axis and the tempereature my y axis. Then I used geom_point to create the scatter plot with the previous variables and made the data points red using aes= “red”. I also made the size = 3 emphasize the empty positions on the plot, such as there being no slow winds under 70 degrees.

I then used geom_smooth to show the trend line. It is already blue so I left it alone as it is a good contrast for the red data points. I played around with the span, but ultimately decided to leave it a higher number. The higher the span the more smooth the line is. The data I have is already spread out so a smaller span will show a sharp correalation which I don’t think exist.