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The Data

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) is a statistical agency that is a part of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA). As its name implies, BTS collects and makes transportation data available, such as the flights data we will be working with in this lab.

First, we’ll view the nycflights data frame. Type the following in your console to load the dat

data("nycflights")

The data set nycflights that shows up in your workspace is a data matrix, with each row representing an observation and each column representing a variable. R calls this data format a data frame, which is a term that will be used throughout the labs. For this data set, each observation is a single flight.

To view the names of the variables, type the command

##  [1] "year"      "month"     "day"       "dep_time"  "dep_delay" "arr_time" 
##  [7] "arr_delay" "carrier"   "tailnum"   "flight"    "origin"    "dest"     
## [13] "air_time"  "distance"  "hour"      "minute"

Remember that you can use glimpse to take a quick peek at your data to understand its contents better.

glimpse(nycflights)
## Rows: 32,735
## Columns: 16
## $ year      <int> 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, …
## $ month     <int> 6, 5, 12, 5, 7, 1, 12, 8, 9, 4, 6, 11, 4, 3, 10, 1, 2, 8, 10…
## $ day       <int> 30, 7, 8, 14, 21, 1, 9, 13, 26, 30, 17, 22, 26, 25, 21, 23, …
## $ dep_time  <int> 940, 1657, 859, 1841, 1102, 1817, 1259, 1920, 725, 1323, 940…
## $ dep_delay <dbl> 15, -3, -1, -4, -3, -3, 14, 85, -10, 62, 5, 5, -2, 115, -4, …
## $ arr_time  <int> 1216, 2104, 1238, 2122, 1230, 2008, 1617, 2032, 1027, 1549, …
## $ arr_delay <dbl> -4, 10, 11, -34, -8, 3, 22, 71, -8, 60, -4, -2, 22, 91, -6, …
## $ carrier   <chr> "VX", "DL", "DL", "DL", "9E", "AA", "WN", "B6", "AA", "EV", …
## $ tailnum   <chr> "N626VA", "N3760C", "N712TW", "N914DL", "N823AY", "N3AXAA", …
## $ flight    <int> 407, 329, 422, 2391, 3652, 353, 1428, 1407, 2279, 4162, 20, …
## $ origin    <chr> "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "LGA", "LGA", "EWR", "JFK", "LGA…
## $ dest      <chr> "LAX", "SJU", "LAX", "TPA", "ORF", "ORD", "HOU", "IAD", "MIA…
## $ air_time  <dbl> 313, 216, 376, 135, 50, 138, 240, 48, 148, 110, 50, 161, 87,…
## $ distance  <dbl> 2475, 1598, 2475, 1005, 296, 733, 1411, 228, 1096, 820, 264,…
## $ hour      <dbl> 9, 16, 8, 18, 11, 18, 12, 19, 7, 13, 9, 13, 8, 20, 12, 20, 6…
## $ minute    <dbl> 40, 57, 59, 41, 2, 17, 59, 20, 25, 23, 40, 20, 9, 54, 17, 24…

Analysis

Departure delays

Let’s start by examing the distribution of departure delays of all flights with a histogram.

ggplot(data = nycflights, aes(x = dep_delay)) +
  geom_histogram()
## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.

ggplot(data = nycflights, aes(x = dep_delay)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 15)

ggplot(data = nycflights, aes(x = dep_delay)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 150)

## Exercise 1

Look carefully at these three histograms. How do they compare? Are features revealed in one that are obscured in another?

#Answer

Yes we can see that the histogram as we increase the binwidth to 15 we see a change to the graph that highlights how drastic our delays are compared to the others but when we increased it to 150 it really affected how much data we could represent on the graph.

If you want to visualize only on delays of flights headed to Los Angeles, you need to first filter the data for flights with that destination (dest == “LAX”) and then make a histogram of the departure delays of only those flights.

lax_flights <- nycflights %>%
  filter(dest == "LAX")
ggplot(data = lax_flights, aes(x = dep_delay)) +
  geom_histogram()
## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.

lax_flights %>%
  summarise(mean_dd   = mean(dep_delay), 
            median_dd = median(dep_delay), 
            n         = n())

Note that each of these functions takes a single vector as an argument and returns a single value.

You can also filter based on multiple criteria. Suppose you are interested in flights headed to San Francisco (SFO) in February:

Exercise 2

Create a new data frame that includes flights headed to SFO in February, and save this data frame as sfo_feb_flights. How many flights meet these criteria?

##Answer 2 There are 68 flights that meet this criteria

sfo_feb_flights <- nycflights %>%
  filter(dest == "SFO", month == 2)
glimpse(sfo_feb_flights)
## Rows: 68
## Columns: 16
## $ year      <int> 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, …
## $ month     <int> 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, …
## $ day       <int> 18, 3, 15, 18, 24, 25, 7, 15, 13, 8, 11, 13, 25, 20, 12, 27,…
## $ dep_time  <int> 1527, 613, 955, 1928, 1340, 1415, 1032, 1805, 1056, 656, 191…
## $ dep_delay <dbl> 57, 14, -5, 15, 2, -10, 1, 20, -4, -4, 40, -2, -1, -6, -7, 2…
## $ arr_time  <int> 1903, 1008, 1313, 2239, 1644, 1737, 1352, 2122, 1412, 1039, …
## $ arr_delay <dbl> 48, 38, -28, -6, -21, -13, -10, 2, -13, -6, 2, -5, -30, -22,…
## $ carrier   <chr> "DL", "UA", "DL", "UA", "UA", "UA", "B6", "AA", "UA", "DL", …
## $ tailnum   <chr> "N711ZX", "N502UA", "N717TW", "N24212", "N76269", "N532UA", …
## $ flight    <int> 1322, 691, 1765, 1214, 1111, 394, 641, 177, 642, 1865, 272, …
## $ origin    <chr> "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "EWR", "EWR", "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "JFK…
## $ dest      <chr> "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO", "SFO…
## $ air_time  <dbl> 358, 367, 338, 353, 341, 355, 359, 338, 347, 361, 332, 351, …
## $ distance  <dbl> 2586, 2586, 2586, 2565, 2565, 2586, 2586, 2586, 2586, 2586, …
## $ hour      <dbl> 15, 6, 9, 19, 13, 14, 10, 18, 10, 6, 19, 8, 10, 18, 7, 17, 1…
## $ minute    <dbl> 27, 13, 55, 28, 40, 15, 32, 5, 56, 56, 10, 33, 48, 49, 23, 2…

Exercise 3

Describe the distribution of the arrival delays of these flights using a histogram and appropriate summary statistics. Hint: The summary statistics you use should depend on the shape of the distribution.

The distribution is more towards the right as we have many outliers within our dataset

ggplot(data = sfo_feb_flights, aes(x = arr_delay)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth=10)

The summary statistics for the distribution is used below

sfo_feb_flights %>%
  summarise(mean_ad = mean(arr_delay), median_ad = median(arr_delay), iqr_ad = IQR(arr_delay), n_flights = n())

Exercise 4

Calculate the median and interquartile range for arr_delays of flights in in the sfo_feb_flights data frame, grouped by carrier. Which carrier has the most variable arrival delays?

The Carrier with the most delays are UA and DL because the have the highest and identical interquartile range .

sfo_feb_flights %>%
  group_by(carrier) %>%
  summarise(Median_ad = median(arr_delay), IQR_ad = IQR(arr_delay), N_flights = n())
nycflights %>%
  group_by(month) %>%
  summarise(mean_dd = mean(dep_delay)) %>%
  arrange(desc(mean_dd))

##Exercise 5

Suppose you really dislike departure delays and you want to schedule your travel in a month that minimizes your potential departure delay leaving NYC. One option is to choose the month with the lowest mean departure delay. Another option is to choose the month with the lowest median departure delay. What are the pros and cons of these two choices?

Median A pro of using the median is that it isn’t skewed because of outliers and represents the middle value of the dataset and a negative is that it doesn’t represent the entirety of the data and how it is distributed.

Mean a benefit of using the mean its shows the average of the entire dataset. A negative in using the mean is that it can be skewed by outliers in the opposite spectrum of the dataset.

nycflights %>%
  group_by(month) %>%
  summarise(median_dd = median(dep_delay)) %>%
  arrange(desc(median_dd))

Exercise 6

If you were selecting an airport simply based on on time departure percentage, which NYC airport would you choose to fly out of?

LGA has the best departure time percentage so i would go with LGA

nycflights <- nycflights %>%
  mutate(dep_type = ifelse(dep_delay < 5, "on time", "delayed"))
ggplot(data = nycflights, aes(x = origin, fill = dep_type)) +
  geom_bar()

Exercise 7

Mutate the data frame so that it includes a new variable that contains the average speed, avg_speed traveled by the plane for each flight (in mph). Hint: Average speed can be calculated as distance divided by number of hours of travel, and note that air_time is given in minutes.

nycflights <- nycflights %>%
  mutate(avg_speed = 60*(distance / air_time))

glimpse(nycflights)
## Rows: 32,735
## Columns: 18
## $ year      <int> 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, …
## $ month     <int> 6, 5, 12, 5, 7, 1, 12, 8, 9, 4, 6, 11, 4, 3, 10, 1, 2, 8, 10…
## $ day       <int> 30, 7, 8, 14, 21, 1, 9, 13, 26, 30, 17, 22, 26, 25, 21, 23, …
## $ dep_time  <int> 940, 1657, 859, 1841, 1102, 1817, 1259, 1920, 725, 1323, 940…
## $ dep_delay <dbl> 15, -3, -1, -4, -3, -3, 14, 85, -10, 62, 5, 5, -2, 115, -4, …
## $ arr_time  <int> 1216, 2104, 1238, 2122, 1230, 2008, 1617, 2032, 1027, 1549, …
## $ arr_delay <dbl> -4, 10, 11, -34, -8, 3, 22, 71, -8, 60, -4, -2, 22, 91, -6, …
## $ carrier   <chr> "VX", "DL", "DL", "DL", "9E", "AA", "WN", "B6", "AA", "EV", …
## $ tailnum   <chr> "N626VA", "N3760C", "N712TW", "N914DL", "N823AY", "N3AXAA", …
## $ flight    <int> 407, 329, 422, 2391, 3652, 353, 1428, 1407, 2279, 4162, 20, …
## $ origin    <chr> "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "JFK", "LGA", "LGA", "EWR", "JFK", "LGA…
## $ dest      <chr> "LAX", "SJU", "LAX", "TPA", "ORF", "ORD", "HOU", "IAD", "MIA…
## $ air_time  <dbl> 313, 216, 376, 135, 50, 138, 240, 48, 148, 110, 50, 161, 87,…
## $ distance  <dbl> 2475, 1598, 2475, 1005, 296, 733, 1411, 228, 1096, 820, 264,…
## $ hour      <dbl> 9, 16, 8, 18, 11, 18, 12, 19, 7, 13, 9, 13, 8, 20, 12, 20, 6…
## $ minute    <dbl> 40, 57, 59, 41, 2, 17, 59, 20, 25, 23, 40, 20, 9, 54, 17, 24…
## $ dep_type  <chr> "delayed", "on time", "on time", "on time", "on time", "on t…
## $ avg_speed <dbl> 474.4409, 443.8889, 394.9468, 446.6667, 355.2000, 318.6957, …

Exercise 8

Make a scatterplot of avg_speed vs. distance. Describe the relationship between average speed and distance. Hint: Use geom_point().

ggplot(data = nycflights, aes(x = distance, y = avg_speed)) + geom_point()

Exercise 9

Replicate the following plot. Hint: The data frame plotted only contains flights from American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, and the points are colored by carrier. Once you replicate the plot, determine (roughly) what the cutoff point is for departure delays where you can still expect to get to your destination on time.

nycflights_3_carriers <- nycflights %>%
  filter(carrier == "AA" | carrier == "DL" | carrier == "UA")
ggplot(data = nycflights_3_carriers, aes(x = dep_delay, y = arr_delay, color= carrier)) + geom_point()