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Lab 3B: Confound It All!

Lab 3B - Confound It All!

Directions: Follow along with the slides and answer the questions in bold font in your IDS Journal.

Finding data in new places

  • Since your first forays into doing data science, you've used data from two sources:

    – Built-in datasets from RStudio.

    – Campaign data from the IDS Campaign Manager.

  • Data can be found in many other places, though - especially online.

  • In this lab, we'll read an observational study dataset from a website. We'll use this data to then explore what factors are associated with a person's lung capacity.

Our new data

  • You can find the data online here (Right-click and select Open in New Window):
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IDSUCLA/dataset/main/fev.csv

  • Variables that were measured include:

    – Age in years.

    – Lung capacity, measured in liters.

    – The youth's heights, in inches

    – Genders; "1" for males, "0" for females.

    – Whether the participant was a smoker, "1", or non-smoker "0".

Importing our data

  • Rather than export-ing the data and then upload-ing and importing-ing it, we'll pull the data straight from the webpage into R.

  • Click on the Import Dataset button under the Environment tab.

    – Then click on the From CSV option.

    – Type or copy/paste the URL into the box, then hit Update.

  • Before importing, change the following Import Options:

    – Name: lungs

    – Uncheck the First Row as Data box

    – Change Delimiter to Whitespace

About the data

The data come from the Forced Expiratory Volume (FEV) study that took place in the late 1970's. The observations come from a sample of 654 youths, aged 3 to 19, in/around East Boston. Researchers were interested in answering the research question, "What is the effect of childhood smoking on lung health?"

Cleaning your data

  • Now that we've got the data loaded, we need to clean it to get it ready for use (Look at Lab 1F for help). Specifically:

    – We want to name the variables: "age", "lung_cap", "height", "gender","smoker", in that order.

    – Change the type of variable for gender and smoker from numeric to character.

  • After changing the variable types for gender and smoker:

    – For gender, use recode to change "1" to "Male" and "0" to "Female".

    – For smoker, use recode to change "1" to "Yes" and "0" to "No".

Analyzing our data

  • Our lungs data is from an observational study.

  • Write down a reason the researchers couldn't use an experiment to test the effects of smoking on children's lungs.

  • Observational studies are often helpful for analyzing how variables are related.

  • Do you think that a person's age affects their lung capacity? Make a sketch of what you think a scatterplot of the two variables would look like and explain.

  • Use the lungs data to create an xyplot of age and lung_cap.

    – Interpret the plot and describe why the relationship between the two variables makes sense.

Smoking and lung capacity

  • Make a plot that can be used to answer the statistical question:

    Do people who smoke tend to have lower lung capacity than those who do not smoke?

  • Use your plot to answer the question.

    – Were you surprised by the answer? Why?

    – Can you suggest a possible confounding factor that might be affecting the result?

Let's compare

  • Create three subsets of the data:

    – One that includes only 13-year-olds ...

    – One that includes only 15-year-olds ...

    – and one that includes only 17-year-olds.

  • Make a plot that compares the lung capacity of smokers and non-smokers for each subset.

  • How does the relationship between smoking and lung capacity change as we increase the age from 13 to 15 to 17?

Sum it up!

  • Does smoking affect lung capacity? If so, how?

    – Support your answers with appropriate plots.

    – Explain why you included the variables you used in your plots.