Abalone Age Calculator

Terry Scantlebury
2017.8.19

Abalone Age Estimation

For more details on the dataset used in this project, please visit https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/abalone.

  • The age of abalone is determined by cutting the shell through the cone, staining it, and counting the number of rings through a microscope – a boring and time-consuming task.

  • Other measurements, which are easier to obtain, can be used to predict the age.

  • This simplified age calculator uses lm models to estimate age from two inputs parameters

Inputs to the lm models

The input parameters are:-

  • Sex
  • Diameter

Additionally, the user can also choose to:-

  • Facet on Sex - producing charts for Male, Female and Infant
  • Include or exclude loess smoothers curves on the output plots

Plots and predictions

Abalone Calculator output

Left side:-

  • UI with input choices

Right side:-

  • Output charts
  • Each plot is a separate lm model
  • The chart with a legend also shows a predicted value
  • The estimated age is displayed below the plots

Calculation

  • Age is estimated as 1.5 times the number of rings predicted
  • Thus for a predicted ring count of 10.3456
  • Age is estimated as 15.5 years.

The server side code that performs this calculation looks like

   (mtext <-
        predict(modelFit,
                newdata = data.frame("Sex" = input$sex, "Diameter" = input$diam))
    paste(round(mtext * 1.5, 1), "years old")

The UI.R and Server.R files are in this github repository https://github.com/TerryScantlebury/AbaloneAgeCalculator