Birthdays and Holidays

The purpose of this project is to analyze any possible relationship between birthdays and holidays. We’ll use the R libraries dplyr, ggplot2, lubridate, as well as the Birthdays data set from the mosaicData library.

First we will draw a plot measuring the number of births for each day in our time frame.

DailyBirths <- Birthdays %>%
  group_by(date) %>%
  summarise(total = sum(births))

DailyBirths %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=date, y = total)) + geom_point()

Next we draw a similar plot, only this time measured by week of the year.

WeeklyBirths <- Birthdays %>%
  mutate(week = week(date)) %>%
  group_by(week) %>%
  summarise(total = sum(births))

WeeklyBirths %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=week, y = total)) + geom_point()

Now by month of the year.

MonthlyBirths <- Birthdays %>%
  mutate(month = month(date)) %>%
  group_by(month) %>%
  summarise(total = sum(births))

MonthlyBirths %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=month, y = total)) + geom_point()

Here we plot by day of the year.

YDailyBirths <- Birthdays %>%
  mutate(yday = yday(date)) %>%
  group_by(yday) %>%
  summarise(total = sum(births))

head(YDailyBirths)

## # A tibble: 6 x 2
##    yday  total
##   <dbl>  <int>
## 1     1 160369
## 2     2 169896
## 3     3 180036
## 4     4 182854
## 5     5 184145
## 6     6 186726

YDailyBirths %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=yday, y = total)) + geom_point()

Next by day of the week.

WDailyBirths <- Birthdays %>%
  mutate(wday = wday(date, label = TRUE)) %>%
  group_by(wday) %>%
  summarise(total = sum(births))

head(WDailyBirths)

## # A tibble: 6 x 2
##    wday    total
##   <ord>    <int>
## 1   Sun  8647150
## 2   Mon 10372019
## 3  Tues 10813928
## 4   Wed 10533539
## 5 Thurs 10434966
## 6   Fri 10593324

WDailyBirths %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=wday, y = total)) + geom_point()

For the remainder of this document, we restrict to the year 1980. First we graph by day of the week for this period.

MyYear <- DailyBirths %>%
  filter(year(date) == 1980) %>%
  mutate(week_day = wday(date, label = TRUE))

MyYear %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=date, y = total, color=week_day)) + geom_line()

Finally we read in a list of holidays and overlay that information with our plot.

Holidays <- read.csv("http://tiny.cc/dcf/US-Holidays.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) %>%
  mutate(date = as.POSIXct(dmy(date))) %>%
  mutate(week_day = wday(date, label = TRUE)) %>%
  filter(year(date) == 1980)

MyYear %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=date, y = total, color=week_day)) +
    geom_line()  +
    geom_vline(data = Holidays, aes(xintercept = as.numeric(date), color = week_day)) +
    geom_text(data = Holidays, mapping=aes(x = date, y = 11000, label = holiday), angle = 45, size = 3, color = "black")

Birthdays and Holidays

Oliver Thistlethwaite