Data Study on Neighborhoods in US Cities

Posted on Aug 2, 2018
The skills the author demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.

Data Visualizing local health data across 500 US Cities

Within an American city, the health of its citizens can vary from one block to the next. I used a data set from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to visualize this difference between neighborhoods across five hundred cities in the United States. This project analyzed data from the annual core questions from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and used these in combination with census data to calculate small area estimates within neighborhoods of American cities.

The project covers five hundred American cities which involved around 100 million citizens, or about 33.4% of the population. The 27 chronic disease measures within this dataset were split into three categories: unhealthy behaviors, preventative measures, and health outcomes. For each measure, the dataset included crude prevalence with 95% confidence intervals. At the citywide level, the age-adjusted prevalence was also given, in which the prevalence that would have existed in a standard population’s distribution of old and young people was calculated.

See the full list of measures in the table below:

Health Outcomes Preventative Measures Unhealthy Behaviors
Arthritis
Stroke
Cancer (excluding skin cancer)
Chronic kidney disease
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Coronary heart disease
Current asthma
Diagnosed diabetes
High blood pressure
High cholesterol among adults aged ≥18 years who have been screened in the past 5 years
Mental health not good for ≥14 days
Physical health not good for ≥14 days
Cholesterol screening
Current lack of health insurance among adults aged 18–64 years
Taking medicine for high blood pressure control among those with high blood pressure
Visits to doctor for routine checkup within the past year
Binge drinking
Current smoking
No leisure-time physical activity
Obesity

 

I decided to visualize this dataset at three scales: statewide, city-wide, and within cities.

Comparing Data across states

On the statewide tab a user could compare two health measures across all the states within the U.S. and see the correlation between those two measures. This would allow a user to compare, for example, unhealthy behaviors with health outcomes. In the example below, I chose “Sleeping less than 7 hours among adults aged >=18 Years” and “Mental health not good for >=14 days among adults aged >=18 Years,” which has a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.83.

Data Study on Neighborhoods in US Cities

 

Comparing data between states and their cities

On the city-wide tab, a user can compare one health measure’s prevalence in all the cities within as many states as they’d like, with the overall prevalence in the U.S. In the example below, I have chosen “No leisure-time physical activity among adults aged >=18 Years” and compared two states, New York and Colorado. The horizontal black line represents the overall prevalence in the U.S.

As one might expect, most cities in New York state have a higher prevalence of “no leisure-time physical activity” than the U.S. as a whole, while cities in Colorado fall below the U.S. average. This makes sense, considering all the outdoor activities that are a common part of the culture within Colorado state.

Data Study on Neighborhoods in US Cities

Comparing within cities

On the last tab, I created an interactive map that made use of the most important part of this dataset: the small area estimates for regions within cities. The circle markers on this map have a radius proportional to the population of the census tract area where they are placed, and a color red, orange, yellow, or green corresponding to quartiles of the U.S. overall within that measure.

Data Study on Neighborhoods in US Cities

 

One can zoom in to one city, clicking on a circle to get more information like the exact prevalence, the confidence interval, and the population:

 

 

This interactive map makes use of the most innovative part of the dataset: the small area estimates that scale down to the size of census tracts. This would allow policy makers and city officials to determine where improved health services may be needed on the level of very specific neighborhoods.

Future work:

I think the ideal implementation of this visualization would have involved a correlation between two measures inside an interactive map, somehow combining the first and third tabs. This would allow users to see exactly how certain unhealthy behaviors or preventative measures might correlate with health outcomes to determine which preventative measures or health programs might be best used, and exactly where.

Link to code: https://github.com/geoghan12/ShinyFiveHundredCities

About Author

Sophie Geoghan

Sophie is currently a NYC Data Science Fellow. She graduated from MIT with a BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2016 and spent one year working as a research assistant in neuroscience labs through MIT's MISTI program....
View all posts by Sophie Geoghan >

Leave a Comment

No comments found.

View Posts by Categories


Our Recent Popular Posts


View Posts by Tags

#python #trainwithnycdsa 2019 2020 Revenue 3-points agriculture air quality airbnb airline alcohol Alex Baransky algorithm alumni Alumni Interview Alumni Reviews Alumni Spotlight alumni story Alumnus ames dataset ames housing dataset apartment rent API Application artist aws bank loans beautiful soup Best Bootcamp Best Data Science 2019 Best Data Science Bootcamp Best Data Science Bootcamp 2020 Best Ranked Big Data Book Launch Book-Signing bootcamp Bootcamp Alumni Bootcamp Prep boston safety Bundles cake recipe California Cancer Research capstone car price Career Career Day citibike classic cars classpass clustering Coding Course Demo Course Report covid 19 credit credit card crime frequency crops D3.js data data analysis Data Analyst data analytics data for tripadvisor reviews data science Data Science Academy Data Science Bootcamp Data science jobs Data Science Reviews Data Scientist Data Scientist Jobs data visualization database Deep Learning Demo Day Discount disney dplyr drug data e-commerce economy employee employee burnout employer networking environment feature engineering Finance Financial Data Science fitness studio Flask flight delay gbm Get Hired ggplot2 googleVis H20 Hadoop hallmark holiday movie happiness healthcare frauds higgs boson Hiring hiring partner events Hiring Partners hotels housing housing data housing predictions housing price hy-vee Income Industry Experts Injuries Instructor Blog Instructor Interview insurance italki Job Job Placement Jobs Jon Krohn JP Morgan Chase Kaggle Kickstarter las vegas airport lasso regression Lead Data Scienctist Lead Data Scientist leaflet league linear regression Logistic Regression machine learning Maps market matplotlib Medical Research Meet the team meetup methal health miami beach movie music Napoli NBA netflix Networking neural network Neural networks New Courses NHL nlp NYC NYC Data Science nyc data science academy NYC Open Data nyc property NYCDSA NYCDSA Alumni Online Online Bootcamp Online Training Open Data painter pandas Part-time performance phoenix pollutants Portfolio Development precision measurement prediction Prework Programming public safety PwC python Python Data Analysis python machine learning python scrapy python web scraping python webscraping Python Workshop R R Data Analysis R language R Programming R Shiny r studio R Visualization R Workshop R-bloggers random forest Ranking recommendation recommendation system regression Remote remote data science bootcamp Scrapy scrapy visualization seaborn seafood type Selenium sentiment analysis sentiment classification Shiny Shiny Dashboard Spark Special Special Summer Sports statistics streaming Student Interview Student Showcase SVM Switchup Tableau teachers team team performance TensorFlow Testimonial tf-idf Top Data Science Bootcamp Top manufacturing companies Transfers tweets twitter videos visualization wallstreet wallstreetbets web scraping Weekend Course What to expect whiskey whiskeyadvocate wildfire word cloud word2vec XGBoost yelp youtube trending ZORI