It is now possible to collect a large amount of data about personal movement using activity monitoring devices such as a Fitbit, Nike Fuelband, or Jawbone Up. These type of devices are part of the "quantified self" movement -- a group of enthusiasts who take measurements about themselves regularly to improve their health, to find patterns in their behavior, or because they are tech geeks. But these data remain under-utilized both because the raw data are hard to obtain and there is a lack of statistical methods and software for processing and interpreting the data.
This assignment makes use of data from a personal activity monitoring device. This device collects data at 5 minute intervals through out the day. The data consists of two months of data from an anonymous individual collected during the months of October and November, 2012 and include the number of steps taken in 5 minute intervals each day.
The data for this assignment can be downloaded from the course web site:
- Dataset: Activity monitoring data [52K]
The variables included in this dataset are:
-
steps: Number of steps taking in a 5-minute interval (missing values are coded as
NA
) -
date: The date on which the measurement was taken in YYYY-MM-DD format
-
interval: Identifier for the 5-minute interval in which measurement was taken
The dataset is stored in a comma-separated-value (CSV) file and there are a total of 17,568 observations in this dataset.
This assignment will be described in multiple parts. You will need to write a report that answers the questions detailed below. Ultimately, you will need to complete the entire assignment in a single R markdown document that can be processed by knitr and be transformed into an HTML file.
Throughout your report make sure you always include the code that you
used to generate the output you present. When writing code chunks in
the R markdown document, always use echo = TRUE
so that someone else
will be able to read the code. This assignment will be evaluated via
peer assessment so it is essential that your peer evaluators be able
to review the code for your analysis.
For the plotting aspects of this assignment, feel free to use any plotting system in R (i.e., base, lattice, ggplot2)
Show any code that is needed to
-
Load the data (i.e.
read.csv()
) -
Process/transform the data (if necessary) into a format suitable for your analysis
For this part of the assignment, you can ignore the missing values in the dataset.
-
Make a histogram of the total number of steps taken each day
-
Calculate and report the mean and median total number of steps taken per day
-
Make a time series plot (i.e.
type = "l"
) of the 5-minute interval (x-axis) and the average number of steps taken, averaged across all days (y-axis) -
Which 5-minute interval, on average across all the days in the dataset, contains the maximum number of steps?
Note that there are a number of days/intervals where there are missing
values (coded as NA
). The presence of missing days may introduce
bias into some calculations or summaries of the data.
-
Calculate and report the total number of missing values in the dataset (i.e. the total number of rows with
NA
s) -
Devise a strategy for filling in all of the missing values in the dataset. The strategy does not need to be sophisticated. For example, you could use the mean/median for that day, or the mean for that 5-minute interval, etc.
-
Create a new dataset that is equal to the original dataset but with the missing data filled in.
-
Make a histogram of the total number of steps taken each day and Calculate and report the mean and median total number of steps taken per day. Do these values differ from the estimates from the first part of the assignment? What is the impact of imputing missing data on the estimates of the total daily number of steps?
For this part the weekdays()
function may be of some help here. Use
the dataset with the filled-in missing values for this part.
-
Create a new factor variable in the dataset with two levels -- "weekday" and "weekend" indicating whether a given date is a weekday or weekend day.
-
Make a panel plot containing a time series plot (i.e.
type = "l"
) of the 5-minute interval (x-axis) and the average number of steps taken, averaged across all weekday days or weekend days (y-axis). The plot should look something like the following, which was creating using simulated data:
Your plot will look different from the one above because you will be using the activity monitor data. Note that the above plot was made using the lattice system but you can make the same version of the plot using any plotting system you choose.
To submit the assignment:
Publish your document at rpubs.com