Hi! My name is Susan Jaw and I am currently a sophomore who is undecided, but is planning to apply to the nursing program for very soon. Having only been taking science classes in college, Data 101 is completely new to me, but I am always open to try new things!
For the second project, I had a lot of trouble finding data that was interesting to me (how are people doing this?!) but I eventually found data on infant mortality rates and the life expectancy at birth in various nations. It caught my eye when I saw how there was a dramatic difference in the data between nations, such as Japan and India.
Using R was very difficult for me due to my data set being hard to use. I had three separate csv files with very little information that was grouped into columns and rows that I initially found confusing. I ended up reorganizing some of the data, as R would not properly recognize the data set (or maybe I was just doing it wrong which is very likely as well!) It took me a while to figure out the codes but eventually I was able to come up with a bar graph, line plot, and a pie chart.
As for the bar graph, I made a plot to compare the infant mortality rates between the nations of France, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, India, and China. I found that India and China had a significantly higher mortality rate as compared to the other nations. At first, I thought the trend was that these were countries in Asia. However, my prediction was disproved as Japan had the lowest mortality rate as compared to all the other nations. So what’s the trend here?
I decided to compare the life expectancy at birth between India (the nation that had the highest infant mortality rate) and Japan (the nation that had the lowest infant mortality rate). I found that India had a much shorter life expectancy of 70 years old, whereas Japan had a life expectancy of 82! India’s life expectancy rate increased dramatically since 1985, where their life expectancy was 55. However, in 1985 Japan’s life expectancy was 77, which is still higher than India’s life expectancy today! Why does India have a high infant mortality rate and a low life expectancy age?
After much thought, I predicted that population sizes may be the answer to such question. I decided to make a pie chart on the population sizes of those nations in the previous data in which I converted each population size into a percentage of the whole. I found that my prediction was not necessarily true, as France and United Kingdom had a smaller population than Japan but Japan has a smaller rate of infant mortality and China had a higher population than India. However, China, India, and United States have the largest population and highest infant mortality rate, so there is still a good chance that population is a factor!
Overall, the hardest part of the assignment was finding data that was interesting, easy to understand, and usable on R. The coding part was confusing at first but after the first plot I began to understand how it worked and the next few plots took a much shorter time (though there are still parts where I am lost).