Flights and pipes

Data visualization and transformation
Data Science with R

Introduction

Have you ever had a flight delayed? How common is that? Which airlines are delayed more than others?

Packages

We will use the tidyverse packages for data wrangling and visualization and the nycflights13 package for the data.

Data

The dataset we will explore is called flights. Let’s glimpse() at it.

glimpse(flights)
Rows: 336,776
Columns: 19
$ year           <int> 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2013, 2…
$ month          <int> 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1…
$ day            <int> 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1…
$ dep_time       <int> 517, 533, 542, 544, 554, 554, 555, 557, 557, 558, 558, …
$ sched_dep_time <int> 515, 529, 540, 545, 600, 558, 600, 600, 600, 600, 600, …
$ dep_delay      <dbl> 2, 4, 2, -1, -6, -4, -5, -3, -3, -2, -2, -2, -2, -2, -1…
$ arr_time       <int> 830, 850, 923, 1004, 812, 740, 913, 709, 838, 753, 849,…
$ sched_arr_time <int> 819, 830, 850, 1022, 837, 728, 854, 723, 846, 745, 851,…
$ arr_delay      <dbl> 11, 20, 33, -18, -25, 12, 19, -14, -8, 8, -2, -3, 7, -1…
$ carrier        <chr> "UA", "UA", "AA", "B6", "DL", "UA", "B6", "EV", "B6", "…
$ flight         <int> 1545, 1714, 1141, 725, 461, 1696, 507, 5708, 79, 301, 4…
$ tailnum        <chr> "N14228", "N24211", "N619AA", "N804JB", "N668DN", "N394…
$ origin         <chr> "EWR", "LGA", "JFK", "JFK", "LGA", "EWR", "EWR", "LGA",…
$ dest           <chr> "IAH", "IAH", "MIA", "BQN", "ATL", "ORD", "FLL", "IAD",…
$ air_time       <dbl> 227, 227, 160, 183, 116, 150, 158, 53, 140, 138, 149, 1…
$ distance       <dbl> 1400, 1416, 1089, 1576, 762, 719, 1065, 229, 944, 733, …
$ hour           <dbl> 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6…
$ minute         <dbl> 15, 29, 40, 45, 0, 58, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 59, 0…
$ time_hour      <dttm> 2013-01-01 05:00:00, 2013-01-01 05:00:00, 2013-01-01 0…

Exploring flights

Exercise 1

Fill in the blanks:

The flights data frame has ___ rows. Each row represents a ___.

Exercise 2

What are the names of the variables in flights.

# add code here

Exercise 3 - select()

  • Make a data frame that only contains the variables dep_delay and arr_delay.
# add code here
  • Make a data frame that keeps every variable except dep_delay.
# add code here
  • Make a data frame that includes all variables between year through dep_delay (inclusive). These are all variables that provide information about the departure of each flight.
# add code here
  • Use the select helper contains() to make a data frame that includes the variables associated with the arrival, i.e., contains the string "arr_" in the name.
# add code here

Exercise 4 - slice()

  • Display the first five rows of the flights data frame.
# add code here
  • Display the last two rows of the flights data frame.
# add code here

Exercise 5 - arrange()

  • Let’s arrange the data by departure delay, so the flights with the shortest departure delays will be at the top of the data frame.
# add code here
  • What does it mean for the dep_delay to have a negative value?

Add your response here.

  • Arrange the data by descending departure delay, so the flights with the longest departure delays will be at the top.
# add code here
  • Create a data frame that only includes the plane tail number (tailnum), carrier (carrier), and departure delay for the flight with the longest departure delay. What is the plane tail number (tailnum) for this flight?
# add code here

Exercise 6 - filter()

  • Filter for all rows where the destination airport is RDU.
# add code here
  • Filter for all rows where the destination airport is RDU and the arrival delay is less than 0.
# add code here
  • Describe what the code is doing in words.

Add response here.

flights |>
  filter(
    dest %in% c("RDU", "GSO"),
    arr_delay < 0 | dep_delay < 0
  )
# A tibble: 6,203 × 19
    year month   day dep_time sched_dep_time dep_delay arr_time sched_arr_time
   <int> <int> <int>    <int>          <int>     <dbl>    <int>          <int>
 1  2013     1     1      800            810       -10      949            955
 2  2013     1     1      832            840        -8     1006           1030
 3  2013     1     1      851            851         0     1032           1036
 4  2013     1     1      917            920        -3     1052           1108
 5  2013     1     1     1024           1030        -6     1204           1215
 6  2013     1     1     1127           1129        -2     1303           1309
 7  2013     1     1     1157           1205        -8     1342           1345
 8  2013     1     1     1317           1325        -8     1454           1505
 9  2013     1     1     1449           1450        -1     1651           1640
10  2013     1     1     1505           1510        -5     1654           1655
# ℹ 6,193 more rows
# ℹ 11 more variables: arr_delay <dbl>, carrier <chr>, flight <int>,
#   tailnum <chr>, origin <chr>, dest <chr>, air_time <dbl>, distance <dbl>,
#   hour <dbl>, minute <dbl>, time_hour <dttm>

Hint: Logical operators in R:

operator definition
< is less than?
<= is less than or equal to?
> is greater than?
>= is greater than or equal to?
== is exactly equal to?
!= is not equal to?
x & y is x AND y?
x | y is x OR y?
is.na(x) is x NA?
!is.na(x) is x not NA?
x %in% y is x in y?
!(x %in% y) is x not in y?
!x is not x? (only makes sense if x is TRUE or FALSE)

Exercise 7 - count()

  • Create a frequency table of the destination locations for flights from New York.
# add code here
  • In which month was there the fewest number of flights? How many flights were there in that month?
# add code here
  • On which date (month + day) was there the largest number of flights? How many flights were there on that day?
# add code here

Exercise 8 - mutate()

  • Convert air_time (minutes in the air) to hours and then create a new variable, mph, the miles per hour of the flight.
# add code here
  • First, count the number of flights each month, and then calculate the proportion of flights in each month. What proportion of flights take place in July?
# add code here

Exercise 9 - summarize()

  • Find mean arrival delay for all flights.
# add code here

Exercise 10 - group_by()

  • Find mean arrival delay for for each month.
# add code here
  • What is the median departure delay for each airports around NYC (origin)? Which airport has the shortest median departure delay?
# add code here