UFO Database Explorer: Developing Data Products Project (Couresera)

This presentation was produced as part of the peer assessment phase for the final project in the Couresera course Developing Data Products – which is a core component of the Johns Hopkins Data Science certification set of courses.

The assignment ensures students comprehend specific concepts covered in the course:

• shiny to build and publish data product applications.
• RPresentation or slidify to create online presentations as a facet of data prdocuts.

A simple application called the UFO Database Explorer (click here) was built to demonstrate shiny capabilities. Selecting input dates for data examination, users are able to reivew:

• Time series of UFO sightings
• Distribution of sightings by Month, faceted by the type or Shape of the UFO
• Distribution of sightings by Hour of day, facted by Shape

Data Source: The National UFO Reporting Center

The application also provides the user with a display of the data used. Scraping the web site and processing the data for analysis takes time. The code for ingestion and tidying of the data is available in the githup repository. The application makes use of ingested, pre-processed data with code like the following:

cnt = readRDS('data/UFOSightings.Rda')
    cnt[1:3,]

Producing output like the following:

  SIGHTINGS       DATE
1       318 2015-09-15
2       581 2015-08-15
3       710 2015-07-15

Since the middle of the 20th century, UFO sightings have steadily increased. For example, from 2000 through 2015, the output depicts a steady rise of sightings: