EDA Case Study: Titanic

1. Task Description

Titanic is a classical Kaggle competition. The task is to predicts which passengers survived the Titanic shipwreck. For more detail, refer to https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic/overview/description.

2. Goal of this notebook

As it is a famous competition, there exists lots of excelent analysis on how to do eda and how to build model for this task. See https://www.kaggle.com/startupsci/titanic-data-science-solutions for a reference. In this notebook, we will show how dataprep.eda can simplify the eda process using a few lines of code.

3. Load data

[1]:
from dataprep.eda import *
from dataprep.datasets import load_dataset
train_df = load_dataset("titanic")
train_df
[1]:
PassengerId Survived Pclass Name Sex Age SibSp Parch Ticket Fare Cabin Embarked
0 1 0 3 Braund, Mr. Owen Harris male 22.0 1 0 A/5 21171 7.2500 NaN S
1 2 1 1 Cumings, Mrs. John Bradley (Florence Briggs Th... female 38.0 1 0 PC 17599 71.2833 C85 C
2 3 1 3 Heikkinen, Miss. Laina female 26.0 0 0 STON/O2. 3101282 7.9250 NaN S
3 4 1 1 Futrelle, Mrs. Jacques Heath (Lily May Peel) female 35.0 1 0 113803 53.1000 C123 S
4 5 0 3 Allen, Mr. William Henry male 35.0 0 0 373450 8.0500 NaN S
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
886 887 0 2 Montvila, Rev. Juozas male 27.0 0 0 211536 13.0000 NaN S
887 888 1 1 Graham, Miss. Margaret Edith female 19.0 0 0 112053 30.0000 B42 S
888 889 0 3 Johnston, Miss. Catherine Helen "Carrie" female NaN 1 2 W./C. 6607 23.4500 NaN S
889 890 1 1 Behr, Mr. Karl Howell male 26.0 0 0 111369 30.0000 C148 C
890 891 0 3 Dooley, Mr. Patrick male 32.0 0 0 370376 7.7500 NaN Q

891 rows × 12 columns

4. Glimpse of the data

The first thing we need to do is to rounghly understand the data. I.e., how many columns are available, which columns are categorical, which columns are numerical, and which column contains missing values. In dataprep.eda, all of the above questions could be answered in just one line of code!

[2]:
plot(train_df)
[2]:
DataPrep.EDA Report
Dataset Statistics
Number of Variables 12
Number of Rows 891
Missing Cells 866
Missing Cells (%) 8.1%
Duplicate Rows 0
Duplicate Rows (%) 0.0%
Total Size in Memory 315.0 KB
Average Row Size in Memory 362.1 B
Variable Types
  • Numerical: 3
  • Categorical: 9
Dataset Insights
PassengerId is uniformly distributed Uniform
Age has 177 (19.87%) missing values Missing
Cabin has 687 (77.1%) missing values Missing
Fare is skewed Skewed
Name has a high cardinality: 891 distinct values High Cardinality
Ticket has a high cardinality: 681 distinct values High Cardinality
Cabin has a high cardinality: 147 distinct values High Cardinality
Survived has constant length 1 Constant Length
Pclass has constant length 1 Constant Length
SibSp has constant length 1 Constant Length
Dataset Insights
Parch has constant length 1 Constant Length
Embarked has constant length 1 Constant Length
Name has all distinct values Unique
  • 1
  • 2

The plot(df) shows the distribution of each column. For a categorical column, it shows the bar chart with blue color. For a numeric column, it shows the histgorm with gray color. Currently, the column type (i.e., categorical or numeric) is based on the column type in input dataframe. Hence, if some column types is wrongly identified, you could change its type on the dataframe. For example, by calling df[col] = df[col].astype(“object”) you could identify col as a categorical column.

From the output of plot(df), we know: 1. All Columns: there are 1 label column Survived and 11 feature columns, which are PassengerId, Pclass, Name, Sex, Age, SibSp, Parch, Ticket, Fare, Cabin, Embarked. 2. Categorical Columns: Survived, PassengerId, Pclass, Name, Sex, Ticket, Embarked. 3. Numeric Columns: Age, SibSp, Parch, Fare. 4. Missing Values: From the figure title, we can find there are 3 columns with missing values. I.e., Age (19.9%), Cabin (77.1%), Embarked(0.2%). 5. Label Balance: From the distribution of Survived, we are aware that the positive and negative training examples and not very balanced. There are 38% data with label Survived = 1.

5. Identify useful features

After we roungly know the data, next we want to understand how each feature is correlated to the label column. ### 5.1 Age, Cabin, and Embarked: features with missing values. We first take a look at features with missing values: age, cabin and embarked. To understand the missing value, we first call plot_missing(df) to see whether the missing values have any underlaying pattern.

[3]:
plot_missing(train_df)
[3]:
DataPrep.EDA Report

Missing Statistics

Missing Cells866
Missing Cells (%)8.1%
Missing Columns3
Missing Rows708
Avg Missing Cells per Column72.17
Avg Missing Cells per Row0.97
'height': 500
Height of the plot
'width': 500
Width of the plot
'spectrum.bins': 20
Number of bins
'height': 500
Height of the plot
'width': 500
Width of the plot
'height': 500
Height of the plot
'width': 500
Width of the plot
'height': 500
Height of the plot
'width': 500
Width of the plot

plot_missing(df) shows how missing values are distributed in the input data. From the output, we know that the missing value is uniformly distribution among records, and there is no underlaying pattern. Next, we decide how to handle the missing values: should we remove the feature, remove the rows contain missing values, or filling the missing values? We first analyze whether they are correlated to Survived. If they are correlated, then we may do not want to remove the feature. We analyze the correlation between two columns by calling plot(df, x, y).

[4]:
for feature in ['Age', 'Cabin', 'Embarked']:
    plot(train_df, feature, 'Survived').show()
DataPrep.EDA Report