Airquality Assignment

Author

Janithri Pannala

Published

February 1, 2024

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$Temp)
[1] 77.88235
#mean(airquality[,4])

Calculate Median, Standard Deviation, and Variance

median(airquality$Temp)
[1] 79
sd(airquality$Wind)
[1] 3.523001
var(airquality$Wind)
[1] 12.41154
unique(airquality$Month)
[1] 5 6 7 8 9
summary(airquality$Ozone)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
   1.00   18.00   31.50   42.13   63.25  168.00      37 

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

unique(airquality$Month)
[1] "May"       "June"      "July"      "August"    "September"

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: Create a scatterplot categorized by Monthly Wind

p5 <- airquality |>
  ggplot(aes(x = Month,y = Wind, color=Wind))+
  scale_color_gradient2(low = "yellow", high = "red")+
  labs(x="Monthly Wind", y="Wind",
  title="Scatter plot of Monthly Wind",
  Caption="NYS Department of Conservation and the National Weather Serive")+
  geom_point()
  #scale_color_discrete( name = "Month", labels = c("May","June","July","August","September","October"))
p5

The scatter plot above shows the difference between the winds from May to October. This scatter plot helps the viewer to get a better understanding of how was the wind over the months.

My scatter plot has color yellow to indicate the low frequency and the color red to indicate the high frequency of the wind. The point of the this scatter plot is to include an axis, a label, a title, and a caption to show the meaning of the provided data. Mainly, I used ggplot to design this scatter plot along with some other coding features on R studio. Such as, tidyverse, geom_point,geom_box plot,and scale_color_discrete.

At last, the above scatter plot shows the viewer what was the speed of the wind and how it gradually increased. or decreased over the seasons.