Project Journal, Week 6
Welcome back to our DATA 360 team blog! In this blog we will walk you through the surface of our first stages of data visualization and analysis.
Since our overriding function is to investigate factors that correlate to crime in order to draw reasoned ideas about the crime rate in the city of Chicago. In this week’s blog post, we first looked at the Chicago Crime Data which shows data from 2001 to date. As mentioned in the previous blog post, we are hoping to do a lot more with this data but as for now, what we did was a simple visualization to crack the ground for analysis. We wanted to at least have a starting point so that we draw ideas from another, from simple ideas to more complex ideas.
DATA VISUALIZATION
We loaded the csv version of the data that we acquired from Kaggle.com into Jupyter Notebook . We made a simple visualization to show what the data roughly looked like.
On the y-axis we have the number of crime entries recorded per year. The x-axis is the date in 2-year intervals as shown above.
DEDUCTIONS
As seen from the graph above, there is a gentle decrease in number of crimes from 2001-present. This is what gave us the whole idea about this project. What are the most unlikely factors to have caused this decline? We continued to look closely on the graph and noticed that the middle months of the years had more crime entries than the early and later months.
This shows that around summer time, there is a lot more crime than the rest of the year. This brings in the temperature factor. We took the data set for temperatures recorded at Midway Airport from 2001–2019.
The x-axis is representing the average temperature and the y axis is representing the crime incidents recorded. We can clearly see that a lot of entries are around the 75 degrees Fahrenheit mark. We can take away the fact that the warmer it gets, the greater the probability for crime.
WHY THE SUMMER TIME?
A lot can be said about why crime is more prevalent in the summer but here is a few things that came out of our group discussion.
- Since there is prolonged daylight, people tend to spend more time outdoors therefore leaving their houses at risk of burglary.
- There are a lot more events that are held in Chicago during the summer and this may increase the probability of violence occurring.
- Most people stay away from a lot of outdoor activity during the colder months and therefore this may reduce the number of crimes that occur.
- People gather in groups as shown on the picture above and that is the best hunting ground for criminals. Pickpocketers may work best in situations like these. Children may easily wander and get kidnapped. There is a lot that can happen there.
If you have more to say about this you can let us know in the comment section. If you have any suggestions for this project you can also put them into the comment section. This brings us to the end of this blog and watch out for another post in the coming days.
