Incorporating Open Data Into Introductory Courses in Statistics

Figures & data

Fig. 1 Steps required to calculate murder rate data for Puerto Rico by year and police district.

Table 1 Top five 2015 murder rates (per 100,000 people) in U.S. cities and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

St. Louis	Baltimore	Detroit	New Orleans	San Juan
59.2	55.37	43.82	41.68	33.2

Table 2 Murder rate per 100,000 residents in some of U.S. states and Puerto Rico.

Year	Puerto Rico	New York	Florida	California
2012	26.9	3.5	5.2	5.0
2013	25.3	3.3	5.0	4.6
2014	19.3	3.1	5.8	4.4
2015	16.9	–	–	–

Fig. 2 Number of vehicle stops and searches by race in San Diego in 2016.

Fig. 3 Number of vehicle stops and searches by race and gender in San Diego in 2016.

Fig. 4 Left panel displays the time series plot of monthly nonresident hotel registrations in Puerto Rico (in thousands). Right panel shows the separate distributions of monthly nonresident registrations (in thousands) for each calendar month.

Fig. 5 Screen shot of the Baltimore housing variables motion chart, showing percent of residential properties vacant versus percent of properties under mortgage foreclosure. Variables to show can be selected from pull down menus that appear when the arrows are pressed (black circles). Selecting a community (green circle) and then running the animation will track the chosen community over time.

Fig. 6 Annual average of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), McKee, Doesken, and Kleist (1993), for accumulation of rain every 3 months across many weather stations in Puerto Rico. Each line represents a station and each column indicates a year. Period covered is 1956 through 2015. Negative SPI indicates below average rain at the weather station while positive SPI indicates above average rain. Vertical lines for droughts of 1967, 1994, and 2015 serve as benchmarks.

Fig. 7 Scatterplot of cheese fat percentage and moisture percentage color coded by cheese type, using Canada open data (https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data). It is hard to tell in this chart if cheese type has any influence in the association between fat percentage and moisture percentage.

Fig. 8 Scatterplots of cheese fat percentage and moisture percentage per cheese type, using data from the Canada open data portal. It is easier to tell in this chart that cheese type has some influence in the association between fat percentage and moisture percentage. See supplementary materials for reproducible R code.

Table 3 A few more ideas for incorporating open data into introductory statistics.

Data	Location	Topic	Comments
Lead in water	Toronto	Quartiles	Data is censored.
Emergency response time	New York City	ANOVA	Large data makes it easier
for cardiac arrest			to detect smaller differences among parameters.
Legal marijuana sales	Washington	Two population test	ANOVA on product type possible as well.
Fatal shootings	Philadelphia	Two proportion inference	Confidence interval or testing.
Taxi ride data	Chicago	Multiple linear regression	Over 113 million taxi rides.
			Big data methods necessary.
Meteorite mass	World	Shape of distribution	Choose specific meteorite classification.
Tourism employment	Canada	Time series	Seasonal component and global trend present.

NOTE: See supplementary materials for reproducible R codes.

McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., and Kleist, J. (1993), “The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales,” in Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Applied Climatology (Vol. 17), American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA, pp. 179–183.

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