Think Stats: Cleaning and Augmenting Data

This is the second instalment of our Think Stats study group; we are working through Allen Downey's Think Stats, implementing everything in Clojure. In the first part we implemented a parser for Stata dictionary and data files. Now we are going to use that to start exploring the National Survey of Family Growth data with Incanter, a Clojure library for statistical computing and graphics.

If you'd like to follow along, start by cloning our thinkstats repository from Github:

git clone https://github.com/ray1729/thinkstats.git --recursive

I've made two innovations since writing the first post in this series. I realised that I could include Allen's repository as a git submodule, hence the --recursive option above. This means the data files will be in a predictable place in our project folder so we can refer to them in the examples. I've also included Gorilla REPL in the project, so if you want to try out the examples but aren't familiar with the Clojure tool chain, you can simply run:

lein gorilla

This will print out a URL for you to open in your browser. You can then start running the examples and seeing the output in your browser. Read more about Gorilla REPL here: http://gorilla-repl.org/.

To Business... #

Gorilla has created the namespace harmonious-willow for our worksheet. We'll start by importing the Incanter and thinkstats namespaces we require:

(ns harmonious-willow
  (:require [incanter.core :as i
              :refer [$ $map $where $rollup $order $fn $group-by $join]]
            [incanter.stats :as s]
            [thinkstats.dct-parser :as dct]))

Incanter defines a number of handy functions whose names begin with $; we're likely to use these a lot, so I've imported them into our namespace. We'll refer to the other Incanter functions we need by qualifying them with the i/ or s/ prefix.

Load the NFSG Pregnancy data into an Incanter dataset:

(def ds (dct/as-dataset "ThinkStats2/code/2002FemPreg.dct"
                        "ThinkStats2/code/2002FemPreg.dat.gz"))

Incanter's dim function tells us the number of rows and columns in the dataset:

(i/dim ds)
;=> [13593 243]

and col-names lists the column names:

(i/col-names ds)
;=> [:caseid :pregordr :howpreg-n :howpreg-p ...]

We can select a subset of rows or columns from the dataset using sel:

(i/sel ds :cols [:caseid :pregordr] :rows (range 10))

Either of :rows or :cols may be omitted, but you'll get a lot of data back if you ask for all rows. Selecting subsets of a dataset is such a common thing to do that Incanter provides the function $ as a short-cut (but note the different argument order):

($ (range 10) [:caseid :pregordr] ds)

If the first argument is omitted, it will return all rows. This returns a new Incanter dataset, but if you ask for just a single column and don't wrap the argument in a vector, you get back a sequence of values for that column:

(take 10 ($ :caseid ds))
;=> ("1" "1" "2" "2" "2" "6" "6" "6" "7" "7")

Cleaning data #

Before we start to analyze the data, we may want to remove outliers or other special values. For example, the :birthwgt-lb column gives the birth weight in pounds of the first baby in the pregnancy. Let's look at the top 5 values:

(take 5 (sort > (distinct ($ :birthwgt-lb ds))))
;=> Exception thrown: java.lang.NullPointerException

Oops! That's not what we wanted, we'll have to remove nil values before sorting. We can use Incanter's $where to do this. Although $where has a number of built-in predicates, there isn't one to check for nil values, so we have to write our own:

(def $not-nil {:$fn (complement nil?)})

(take 10 ($ :birthwgt-lb ($where {:birthwgt-lb $not-nil} ds)))
;=> (8 7 9 7 6 8 9 8 7 6)

(take 5 (sort > (distinct ($ :birthwgt-lb
                             ($where {:birthwgt-lb $not-nil} ds)))))
;=> (99 98 97 51 15)

This is still a bit cumbersome, so let's write a variant of sel that returns only the rows where none of the specified columns are nil:

(defn ensure-collection
  [x]
  (if (coll? x) x (vector x)))

(defn sel-defined
  [ds & {:keys [rows cols]}]
  (let [rows (or rows :all)
        cols (or cols (i/col-names ds))]
    (i/sel ($where (zipmap (ensure-collection cols) (repeat $not-nil))
                   ds)
           :rows rows :cols cols)))

(take 5 (sort > (distinct (sel-defined ds :cols :birthwgt-lb))))
;=> (99 98 97 51 15)

Looking up the definition of :birthwgt-lb in the code book, we see that values greater than 95 encode special meaning:

We'd like to remove these values (and the obvious outlier 51) from the dataset before processing it. Incanter provides the function transform-col that applies a function to each value in the specified column of a dataset and returns a new dataset. Using this, we can write a helper function for setting illegal values to nil:

(defn set-invalid-nil
  [ds col valid?]
  (i/transform-col ds col (fn [v] (when (and v (valid? v)) v))))

(def ds' (set-invalid-nil ds :birthwgt-lb (complement #{51 97 98 99})))

(take 5 (sort > (distinct (sel-defined ds' :cols :birthwgt-lb))))
;=> (15 14 13 12 11)

We should also update the :birthwgt-oz column to remove any values greater than 15:

(def ds'
    (-> ds
        (set-invalid-nil :birthwgt-lb (complement #{51 97 98 99}))
        (set-invalid-nil :birthwgt-oz (fn [v] (<= 0 v 15)))))

Transforming data #

We used the transform-col function in the implementation of set-invalid-nil above. We can also use this to perform an arbitrary calculation on a value. For example, the :agepreg column contains the age of the participant in centiyears (hundredths of a year):

(i/head (sel-defined ds' :cols :agepreg))
;=> (3316 3925 1433 1783 1833 2700 2883 3016 2808 3233)

Let's transform this to years (perhaps fractional):

(defn centiyears->years
  [v]
  (when v (/ v 100.0)))

(def ds' (i/transform-col ds' :agepreg centiyears->years))
(i/head (sel-defined ds' :cols :agepreg))
;=> (33.16 39.25 14.33 17.83 18.33 27.0 28.83 30.16 28.08 32.33)

Augmenting data #

The final function we'll show you this time is add-derived-column; this function adds a column to a dataset, where the added column is a function of other columns. For example:

(defn compute-totalwgt-lb
  [lb oz]
  (when lb (+ lb (/ (or oz 0) 16.0))))

(def ds' (i/add-derived-column :totalwgt-lb
                               [:birthwgt-lb :birthwgt-oz]
                               compute-totalwgt-lb
                               ds'))

(i/head (sel-defined ds' :cols :totalwgt-lb))
;=> (8.8125 7.875 9.125 7.0 6.1875 8.5625 9.5625 8.375 7.5625 6.625)

Putting it all together #

We've built up a new dataset above with a number of transformations. Let's bring these all together into a single function that will thread the dataset through all these transformations. We can't use the usual -> or ->> macros because of an inconsistency in the argument order in the transformations, but Clojure's as-> comes to the rescue here.

(defn clean-and-augment-fem-preg
  [ds]
  (as-> ds ds
    (set-invalid-nil ds :birthwgt-lb (complement #{51 97 98 99}))
    (set-invalid-nil ds :birthwgt-oz (fn [v] (<= 0 v 15)))
    (i/transform-col ds :agepreg centiyears->years)
    (i/add-derived-column :totalwgt-lb
                          [:birthwgt-lb :birthwgt-oz]
                          compute-totalwgt-lb
                          ds)))

Now we can do:

(def ds (clean-and-augment-fem-preg
          (dct/as-dataset "ThinkStats2/code/2002FemPreg.dct"
                          "ThinkStats2/code/2002FemPreg.dat.gz")))

The Incanter helper functions we've implemented can be found in the thinkstats.incanter namespace, along with a $! short-cut for sel-defined that was a bit too complex to show in this post.

In the next part in this series, we start to explore the cleaned dataset.

This article originally appeared in the Metail Tech Blog.