Exploring the Titanic dataset with `seaborn`

Kaggle has a nice dataset with information about passengers on the Titanic. It's meant as an introduction to predictive models -- here, predicting who survived the sinking. Let's explore it using seaborn. This notebook mostly demonstrates features in development for version 0.3. Please get in touch if you have ideas for how they could be improved.



In [11]:

    
%matplotlib inline



In [2]:

    
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="white")

First we load in the data and take a look



In [3]:

    
url = "https://raw.github.com/mattdelhey/kaggle-titanic/master/Data/train.csv"
titanic = pd.read_csv(url)
titanic.info()









    



<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 891 entries, 0 to 890
Data columns (total 11 columns):
survived    891 non-null int64
pclass      891 non-null int64
name        891 non-null object
sex         891 non-null object
age         714 non-null float64
sibsp       891 non-null int64
parch       891 non-null int64
ticket      891 non-null object
fare        891 non-null float64
cabin       204 non-null object
embarked    889 non-null object
dtypes: float64(2), int64(4), object(5)
memory usage: 83.5 KB



In [4]:

    
titanic.head()









    Out[4]:






  
    
      
      survived
      pclass
      name
      sex
      age
      sibsp
      parch
      ticket
      fare
      cabin
      embarked
    
  
  
    
      0
       0
       3
                                 Braund, Mr. Owen Harris
         male
       22
       1
       0
              A/5 21171
        7.2500
        NaN
       S
    
    
      1
       1
       1
       Cumings, Mrs. John Bradley (Florence Briggs Th...
       female
       38
       1
       0
               PC 17599
       71.2833
        C85
       C
    
    
      2
       1
       3
                                  Heikkinen, Miss. Laina
       female
       26
       0
       0
       STON/O2. 3101282
        7.9250
        NaN
       S
    
    
      3
       1
       1
            Futrelle, Mrs. Jacques Heath (Lily May Peel)
       female
       35
       1
       0
                 113803
       53.1000
       C123
       S
    
    
      4
       0
       3
                                Allen, Mr. William Henry
         male
       35
       0
       0
                 373450
        8.0500
        NaN
       S

Let's do little bit of processing to make some different variables that might be more interesting to plot. Since this notebook is focused on visualization, we're going to do this without much comment.



In [5]:

    
def woman_child_or_man(passenger):
    age, sex = passenger
    if age < 16:
        return "child"
    else:
        return dict(male="man", female="woman")[sex]



In [6]:

    
titanic["class"] = titanic.pclass.map({1: "First", 2: "Second", 3: "Third"})
titanic["who"] = titanic[["age", "sex"]].apply(woman_child_or_man, axis=1)
titanic["adult_male"] = titanic.who == "man"
titanic["deck"] = titanic.cabin.str[0].map(lambda s: np.nan if s == "T" else s)
titanic["embark_town"] = titanic.embarked.map({"C": "Cherbourg", "Q": "Queenstown", "S": "Southampton"})
titanic["alive"] = titanic.survived.map({0: "no", 1: "yes"})
titanic["alone"] = ~(titanic.parch + titanic.sibsp).astype(bool)
titanic = titanic.drop(["name", "ticket", "cabin"], axis=1)



In [7]:

    
titanic.head()









    Out[7]:






  
    
      
      survived
      pclass
      sex
      age
      sibsp
      parch
      fare
      embarked
      class
      who
      adult_male
      deck
      embark_town
      alive
      alone
    
  
  
    
      0
       0
       3
         male
       22
       1
       0
        7.2500
       S
       Third
         man
        True
       NaN
       Southampton
        no
       False
    
    
      1
       1
       1
       female
       38
       1
       0
       71.2833
       C
       First
       woman
       False
         C
         Cherbourg
       yes
       False
    
    
      2
       1
       3
       female
       26
       0
       0
        7.9250
       S
       Third
       woman
       False
       NaN
       Southampton
       yes
        True
    
    
      3
       1
       1
       female
       35
       1
       0
       53.1000
       S
       First
       woman
       False
         C
       Southampton
       yes
       False
    
    
      4
       0
       3
         male
       35
       0
       0
        8.0500
       S
       Third
         man
        True
       NaN
       Southampton
        no
        True

Finally set up a palette dictionary for some of the plots.



In [8]:

    
pal = dict(man="#4682B4", woman="#CD5C5C", child="#2E8B57", male="#6495ED", female="#F08080")

Who were the Titanic passengers?

Before getting to the main question (who survived), let's take a look at the dataset to get a sense for how the observations are distributed into the different levels of our factors of interest.

How many men, women, and children are in our sample?

First let's count the number of males and females, ignoring age.



In [8]:

    
sns.factorplot("sex", data=titanic, palette=pal);

Then we can look at how this is distributed into the three classes.



In [9]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="sex", palette=pal);

We also have a separate classification that splits off children (recall, this is going to be relevant because of the "women and children first" policy followed during the evacuation).



In [10]:

    
sns.factorplot("who", data=titanic, palette=pal);



In [11]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="who", palette=pal);

Finally, we made a variable that indicates whether a passanger was an adult male.



In [12]:

    
sns.factorplot("adult_male", data=titanic, palette="Blues");



In [12]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="adult_male", palette="Blues");

Next let's look at the distribution of ages within the groups we defined above.



In [13]:

    
fg = sns.FacetGrid(titanic, hue="sex", aspect=3, palette=pal)
fg.map(sns.kdeplot, "age", shade=True)
fg.set(xlim=(0, 80));



In [14]:

    
fg = sns.FacetGrid(titanic, hue="who", aspect=3, palette=pal)
fg.map(sns.kdeplot, "age", shade=True)
fg.set(xlim=(0, 80));

How many first, second, and third class passengers are in our sample?

Although have some information about the distribution into classes from the sex plots, let's directly visualize it an then see how the classes break down by age.



In [15]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, palette="BuPu_d");



In [16]:

    
fg = sns.FacetGrid(titanic, hue="class", aspect=3, palette="BuPu_d")
fg.map(sns.kdeplot, "age", shade=True)
fg.set(xlim=(0, 80));

Finally let's look at the breakdown by age and sex.



In [17]:

    
fg = sns.FacetGrid(titanic, col="sex", row="class", hue="sex", size=2.5, aspect=2.5, palette=pal)
fg.map(sns.kdeplot, "age", shade=True)
fg.map(sns.rugplot, "age")
sns.despine(left=True)
fg.set(xlim=(0, 80));

Where were our passenger's cabins?

We also have information about what deck each passgener's cabin was on, which may be relevant.



In [19]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", data=titanic, palette="PuBu_d");

How did the decks break down by class for the passengers we have data about?



In [20]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", hue="class", data=titanic, palette="BuPu_d");

Note that we're missing a lot of deck data for the second and third class passengers, which will be important to keep in mind later.

How much did they pay for their tickets?

Since we have data about fares, let's see how those broke down by classes.



In [21]:

    
from seaborn import linearmodels
reload(linearmodels)
reload(sns)
sns.set(style="nogrid")



In [22]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", "fare", data=titanic, palette="BuPu_d");



In [23]:

    
sns.violinplot(titanic["fare"], titanic["class"], color="BuPu_d").set_ylim(0, 600)
sns.despine(left=True);

There are some extreme outliers in the first class distribution; let's winsorize those to get a better sense for how much each class paid.



In [24]:

    
titanic["fare_winsor"] = titanic.fare.map(lambda f: min(f, 200))



In [25]:

    
sns.violinplot(titanic["fare_winsor"], titanic["class"], color="BuPu_d").set_ylim(0, 250)
sns.despine(left=True);

How did the fares break down by deck? Let's look both at the mean and the distribution.



In [26]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", "fare", data=titanic, palette="PuBu_d");



In [27]:

    
sns.violinplot(titanic["fare_winsor"], titanic["deck"], color="PuBu_d")
sns.despine(left=True);

It might make more sense to plot the median fare, since the distributions aren't normal.



In [28]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", "fare", data=titanic, palette="PuBu_d", estimator=np.median);

We can also look at a regression of fare on age to see if older passengers paid more. We'll use robust methods here too, which will accound for the skewed distribution on fare.



In [29]:

    
sns.regplot("age", "fare", data=titanic, robust=True, ci=None, color="seagreen")
sns.despine();

Where did the passengers come from?

The Titanic passengers embarked at one of three ports before the voyage.



In [30]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="embark_town", palette="Set2");

Who was traveling with family members?

We also have some data, although it's not coded very well, about the number of parents/children and the numbe of siblings/spouses on board for each passenger.



In [31]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="parch", palette="BuGn");



In [32]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", data=titanic, hue="sibsp", palette="YlGn");

We defined a variable that just measures whether someone was traveling alone, i.e. without family.



In [33]:

    
sns.factorplot("alone", data=titanic, palette="Greens");

What made people survive the sinking?

Iceberg, dead ahead!

Now that we have a feel for the characteristics of our sample, let's get down to the main question and ask what factors seem to predict whether our passengers survived. But first, one more count plot just to see how many of our passengers perished in the sinking.



In [34]:

    
sns.factorplot("alive", data=titanic, palette="OrRd_d");

What classes had the survivors traveled in?

It's part of popular lore that the third-class (or steerage) passengers fared much more poorly than their wealthier shipmates. Is this borne out in the data?



In [35]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", "survived", data=titanic).set(ylim=(0, 1))









    Out[35]:





<seaborn.axisgrid.FacetGrid at 0x10c134ed0>

We also of course know that women were given high priority during the evacuation, and we saw above that Third class was disproportionately male. Maybe that's driving the class effect?



In [36]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", "survived", data=titanic, hue="sex", palette=pal).set(ylim=(0, 1));

Nope, in general it was not good to be a male or to be in steerage.

What effect did "women and children first" have?

Were they at least successful in evacuating the children?



In [37]:

    
fg = sns.factorplot("class", "survived", data=titanic, hue="who", col="who", palette=pal, aspect=.4)
fg.set(ylim=(0, 1))
fg.despine(left=True)









    Out[37]:





<seaborn.axisgrid.FacetGrid at 0x10c105e10>

Pretty good for first and second class (although the precise estimates are unreliable because there weren't that many children traveling in the upper classes. It's actually the case that every second-class child survived, though).

We suspect that the best way to predict survival is to look at whether a passenger was an adult male and what class he or she was in.



In [38]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", "survived", data=titanic, hue="adult_male", palette="Blues").set(ylim=(0, 1))









    Out[38]:





<seaborn.axisgrid.FacetGrid at 0x10c585550>

Another way to plot the same data emphasizes the different outcomes for men and other passengers even more dramatically.



In [39]:

    
fg = sns.factorplot("adult_male", "survived", data=titanic, col="class", hue="class",
                    aspect=.33, palette="BuPu_d")
fg.set(ylim=(0, 1))
fg.despine(left=True);

Did age matter in general?

We can also ask whether age as a contiunous variable mattered. We'll draw logistic regression plots, first jittering the survival datapoints to get a sense of the distribution.



In [40]:

    
sns.lmplot("age", "survived", titanic, logistic=True, y_jitter=.05);

We can also plot the same data with the survival observations grouped into discrete bins.



In [41]:

    
sns.lmplot("age", "survived", titanic, logistic=True, x_bins=4, truncate=True);

How did age interact with sex and class?

We know that sex is important, though, so we probably want to separate out these predictions for men and women.



In [42]:

    
age_bins = [15, 30, 45, 60]
sns.lmplot("age", "survived", titanic, hue="sex",
           palette=pal, x_bins=age_bins, logistic=True).set(xlim=(0, 80));

Class is imporant too, let's see whether it interacts with the age variable as well.



In [43]:

    
sns.lmplot("age", "survived", titanic, hue="class",
           palette="BuPu_d", x_bins=age_bins, logistic=True).set(xlim=(0, 80));

Because the above plot is rather busy, it might make sense to split the three classes onto separate facets.



In [44]:

    
sns.lmplot("age", "survived", titanic, col="class", hue="class",
           palette="BuPu_d", x_bins=4, logistic=True, size=3).set(xlim=(0, 80));

Did it matter what passengers paid, or where they stayed?

We know that class matters, but we can also use the fare variable as a proxy for a contiuous measure of wealth.



In [45]:

    
sns.lmplot("fare_winsor", "survived", titanic, x_bins=4, logistic=True, truncate=True);

Perhaps it mattered what deck each passenger's cabin was on?



In [46]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", "survived", data=titanic, palette="PuBu_d", join=False);



In [47]:

    
sns.factorplot("deck", "survived", data=titanic, col="class", size=3, palette="PuBu_d", join=False);

Did family members increase the odds of survival?

Although the way our data on family members was coded, we don't know for sure what sort of companions these passengers had, but it's worth asking how they influenced survival.



In [48]:

    
sns.lmplot("parch", "survived", titanic, x_estimator=np.mean, logistic=True);



In [49]:

    
sns.lmplot("parch", "survived", titanic, hue="sex", x_estimator=np.mean, logistic=True, palette=pal);



In [50]:

    
sns.lmplot("sibsp", "survived", titanic, x_estimator=np.mean, logistic=True);

We also have a more interpretable alone variable (although it's reasonable to assume that this is going to be confounded with age).



In [51]:

    
sns.factorplot("alone", "survived", data=titanic).set(ylim=(0, 1));

Did traveling alone have a greater effect depending on what class you were in?



In [52]:

    
fg = sns.factorplot("alone", "survived", data=titanic, col="class", hue="class",
                    aspect=.33, palette="BuPu_d")
fg.set(ylim=(0, 1))
fg.despine(left=True);

As above, a different presentation of the same data emphasizes different comparisons.



In [53]:

    
sns.factorplot("class", "survived", data=titanic, hue="alone", palette="Greens").set(ylim=(0, 1));

What about men and women who were traveling alone?



In [54]:

    
sns.factorplot("alone", "survived", data=titanic, hue="sex", palette=pal).set(ylim=(0, 1));



In [55]:

    
fg = sns.factorplot("alone", "survived", data=titanic, hue="sex",
                    col="class", palette=pal, aspect=.33)
fg.despine(left=True);



In [ ]:

	survived	pclass	name	sex	age	sibsp	ticket	fare	cabin	embarked
0	0	3	Braund, Mr. Owen Harris	male	22	1	A/5 21171	7.2500	NaN	S
1	1	1	Cumings, Mrs. John Bradley (Florence Briggs Th...	female	38	1	PC 17599	71.2833	C85	C
2	1	3	Heikkinen, Miss. Laina	female	26	0	STON/O2. 3101282	7.9250	NaN	S
3	1	1	Futrelle, Mrs. Jacques Heath (Lily May Peel)	female	35	1	113803	53.1000	C123	S
4	0	3	Allen, Mr. William Henry	male	35	0	373450	8.0500	NaN	S

	survived	pclass	sex	age	sibsp	fare	embarked	class	who	adult_male	deck	embark_town	alive	alone
0	0	3	male	22	1	7.2500	S	Third	man	True	NaN	Southampton	no	False
1	1	1	female	38	1	71.2833	C	First	woman	False	C	Cherbourg	yes	False
2	1	3	female	26	0	7.9250	S	Third	woman	False	NaN	Southampton	yes	True
3	1	1	female	35	1	53.1000	S	First	woman	False	C	Southampton	yes	False
4	0	3	male	35	0	8.0500	S	Third	man	True	NaN	Southampton	no	True

Exploring the Titanic dataset with seaborn