Tag Archives: world

A Simple Interactive Map Of US Prisons With Leaflet

The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? (Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist)

Some time ago, I discovered Enigma, an amazing open platform that unifies billions of records from thousands of government sources to make the world of public data universally accessible and useful. This is the first experiment I have done using data from Enigma. This is what I did:

  1. Create a free account, search and download data. Save the csv file in your working directory. File contains information about all prison facilities in the United States (private and state run) as recorded by the Department of Corrections in each state. Facility types, names, addresses (or lat/long coordinates) ownership names and detailed. In sum, there is information about 1.248 prison facilities.
  2. Since most of the prisons of the file do not contain geographical coordinates, I obtain latitude and longitude using geocode function from ggmap package. This step takes some time. I also remove closed facilities. Finally, I obtain a data set with complete information of 953 prison facilities.
  3. After cleaning and filling out data, generating the map is very easy using leaflet package for R. I create a column named popup_info pasting name and address to be shown in the popup. Instead using default OpenStreetMap basemap I use a CartoDB one.

In my opinion, resulting map is very appealing with a minimal effort:

This plot could be a good example of visual correlation, because it depends on this. Here you have the code:

library(dplyr)
library(ggmap)
library(leaflet)
setwd("YOUR WORKING DIRECTORY HERE")
prisons = read.csv(file="enigma-enigma.prisons.all-facilities-bd6a927c4024c16d8ba9e21d52292b0f.csv", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
prisons %>% 
  mutate(address=paste(facility_address1, city, state, zip, "EEUU", sep=", ")) %>%
  select(address) %>% 
  lapply(function(x){geocode(x, output="latlon")})  %>% 
  as.data.frame %>% 
  cbind(prisons) -> prisons
prisons %>%  
  mutate(popup_info=paste(sep = "
", paste0("<b>", facility_name, "</b>"), facility_address1, city, state, zip)) %>% 
  mutate(lon=ifelse(is.na(longitude), address.lon, longitude),
         lat=ifelse(is.na(latitude),  address.lat, latitude)) %>%
  filter(!is.na(lon) & !grepl("CLOSED", facility_name)) -> prisons
leaflet(prisons) %>%
  addProviderTiles("CartoDB.Positron") %>%
  addCircleMarkers(lng = ~lon, 
                   lat = ~lat, 
                   radius = 3, 
                   color = "red",
                   stroke=FALSE,
                   fillOpacity = 0.5,
                   popup = ~popup_info)

The World We Live In #5: Calories And Kilograms

I enjoy doing new tunes; it gives me a little bit to perk up, to pay a little bit more attention (Earl Scruggs, American musician)

I recently finished reading The Signal and the Noise, a book by Nate Silver, creator of the also famous FiveThirtyEight blog. The book is a very good reading for all data science professionals, and is a must in particular for all those who work trying to predict the future. The book praises the bayesian way of thinking as the best way to face and modify predictions and criticizes rigid ways of thinking with many examples of disastrous predictions. I enjoyed a lot the chapter dedicated to chess and how Deep Blue finally took over Kasparov. In a nutshell: I strongly recommend it.
One of the plots of Silver’s book present a case of false negative showing the relationship between obesity and calorie consumption across the world countries. The plot shows that there is no evidence of a connection between both variables. Since it seemed very strange to me, I decided to reproduce the plot by myself.

I compared these two variables:

  • Dietary Energy Consumption (kcal/person/day) estimated by the FAO Food Balance Sheets.
  • Prevalence of Obesity as percentage of defined population with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or higher estimated by the World Health Organization

And this is the resulting plot:

Calories And KilogramsAs you can see there is a strong correlation between two variables. Why the experiment of Nate Silver shows the opposite? Obviously we did not plot the same data (although, in principle, both of us went to the same source). Anyway: to be honest, I prefer my plot because shows what all of we know: the more calories you eat, the more weight you will see in your bathroom scale. Some final thoughts seeing the plot:

  • I would like to be Japanese: they don’t gain weight!
  • Why US people are fatter than Austrian?
  • What happens in Samoa?

Here you have the code to do the plot:

library(xlsx)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
setwd("YOUR WORKING DIRECTORY HERE")
url_calories = "http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/food_security_statistics/FoodConsumptionNutrients_en.xls"
download.file(url_calories, method="internal", destfile = "FoodConsumptionNutrients_en.xls", mode = "ab")
calories = read.xlsx(file="FoodConsumptionNutrients_en.xls", startRow = 4, colIndex = c(2,6), colClasses = c("character", "numeric"), sheetName="Dietary Energy Cons. Countries", stringsAsFactors=FALSE) 
colnames(calories)=c("Country", "Kcal")
url_population = "http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/DVD/Files/1_Excel%20(Standard)/EXCEL_FILES/1_Population/WPP2015_POP_F01_1_TOTAL_POPULATION_BOTH_SEXES.XLS"
download.file(url_population, method="internal", destfile = "Population.xls", mode = "ab")
population = read.xlsx(file="Population.xls", startRow = 17, colIndex = c(3,71), colClasses = c("character", "numeric"), sheetName="ESTIMATES", stringsAsFactors=FALSE) 
colnames(population)=c("Country", "Population")
# http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A900A?lang=en
url_obesity = "http://apps.who.int/gho/athena/data/xmart.csv?target=GHO/NCD_BMI_30A&profile=crosstable&filter=AGEGROUP:*;COUNTRY:*;SEX:*&x-sideaxis=COUNTRY&x-topaxis=GHO;YEAR;AGEGROUP;SEX&x-collapse=true"
obesity = read.csv(file=url_obesity, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
obesity %>% select(matches("Country|2014.*Both")) -> obesity
colnames(obesity)=c("Country", "Obesity")
obesity %>% filter(Obesity!="No data") -> obesity
obesity %>% mutate(Obesity=as.numeric(substr(Obesity, 1, regexpr(pattern = "[[]", obesity$Obesity)-1))) -> obesity
population %>% inner_join(calories,by = "Country") %>% inner_join(obesity,by = "Country") -> data
opts=theme(
  panel.background = element_rect(fill="gray98"),
  panel.border = element_rect(colour="black", fill=NA),
  axis.line = element_line(size = 0.5, colour = "black"),
  axis.ticks = element_line(colour="black"),
  panel.grid.major = element_line(colour="gray75", linetype = 2),
  panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
  axis.text = element_text(colour="gray25", size=15),
  axis.title = element_text(size=18, colour="gray10"),
  legend.key = element_blank(),
  legend.position = "none",
  legend.background = element_blank(),
  plot.title = element_text(size = 40, colour="gray10"))
ggplot(data, aes(x=Kcal, y=Obesity/100, size=log(Population), label=Country), guide=FALSE)+
  geom_point(colour="white", fill="sandybrown", shape=21, alpha=.55)+
  scale_size_continuous(range=c(2,40))+
  scale_x_continuous(limits=c(1500,4100))+
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent)+
  labs(title="The World We Live In #5: Calories And Kilograms",
       x="Dietary Energy Consumption (kcal/person/day)",
       y="% population with body mass index >= 30 kg/m2")+
  geom_text(data=subset(data, Obesity>35|Kcal>3700), size=5.5, colour="gray25", hjust=0, vjust=0)+
  geom_text(data=subset(data, Kcal<2000), size=5.5, colour="gray25", hjust=0, vjust=0)+
  geom_text(data=subset(data, Obesity<10 & Kcal>2600), size=5.5, colour="gray25", hjust=0, vjust=0)+
  geom_text(aes(3100, .01), colour="gray25", hjust=0, label="Source: United Nations (size of bubble depending on population)", size=4.5)+opts