Nov 27, 20214 min read

Exploring US Bikeshare Data project

Key points:

· Project overview

· Bicycle-sharing system

· What Software Do You Need to complete this project?

· Dataset overview

· Some statistical measures we will compute

· Descriptive statistics measures

· Data set details

· Let’s start exploring

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Project overview:

In this project, we are going to utilize Python and descriptive statistics concepts to explore data associated with bike share systems for three big cities in the United States—Chicago, New York City, and Washington.

We will use python to answer some interesting basic statistical questions about the data.

Moreover, we will provide a user interactive experience in the terminal to ask about and represent these statistics.

Bicycle-sharing system:

It is a system that allows you to rent bikes for a reasonable amount of money.

In this system, you can take the bike from one point (station) and then return it to another point (another station) _ that belongs to the system of course after the end of your trip or maybe return to the same starting point again, it depends on the system itself.

In the past years, the bicycle sharing system has developed and spread widely in many cities of the world.

As we mentioned before, in this project we will deal specifically with three major cities, Chicago, New York City, and Washington.

What Software Do You Need to complete this project?

To complete this project, you need:

· Python 3, NumPy, and pandas installed using Anaconda.

Click here to install

· Any text editor you prefer

· A terminal application (Terminal on Mac and Linux or Cygwin on Windows).

For me, I prefer using jupyter notebook, the choice is up to you.

Dataset overview:

In this project, we will work on data provided by Motivate, One of the bike sharing system s providers for many major cities in the United States of America, to uncover bike share usage patterns.

We are going to compare the system usage between three large cities: Chicago, New York City, and Washington.

The data is randomly selected for the first six months of 2017 are provided for all three cities.

Of course You will need the three city dataset files:

chicago.csv
new_york_city.csv
washington.csv

Files are attached to the article, just click on the csv file name to download it .

Some statistical measures we will compute:

By using python we will compute some basic and important statistical measures which we will mention briefly in the next section

We need to compute :

1. Popular times of travel (times occurs most often in the start time)

most common month
most common day of week
most common hour of day

2. Popular stations and trip

most common start station
most common end station
most common trip from start to end (most frequent combination of start station and end station)

3. Trip duration

total travel time
average travel time

4. User info

counts of each user type
counts of each gender (only available for NYC and Chicago)
earliest, most recent, most common year of birth (only available for NYC and Chicago)

you may feel confused now, but be sure that after the next section all will be clear

Descriptive statistics measures:

In order to be able to proceed in this project, we must first be familiar with descriptive statistics

What is descriptive statistics?

We can define descriptive statistics simply as brief descriptive numbers that summarize a particular data set. This data may be ether a population or a sample.

For our project We need to be familiar with two main types of descriptive statistics:

1- measures of central tendency: mean(average), median and mode , for more details check this link

2- measures of spread : range, quartiles and the interquartile range, variance and standard deviation, , for more details check this link

Of course, we will not be able to cover them in detail here, but the mentioned resources(links) will help you.

Data set details:

Python helps us through pandas to view the data and understand it better like :

· viewing the first few rows of the dataset

· how many rows and columns are there in the dataset?

· Returning column names

· What are the different types of values in each column in the dataset?

· How many missing values if exist?

· How many duplicates if exist?

And so on..

This is possible through the use of some methods:

df.head()
df.columns
df.describe()
df.info()
df.duplicated()
df.isnull()
df['column_name'].value_counts()
df['column_name'].unique()

let’s try these methods on Chicago city data :

· viewing the first few rows of the dataset

· how many rows and columns are there in the dataset?

· Returning column names

· What are the different types of values in each column in the dataset?

· How many duplicates if exist?

· How many missing values if exist?

· And a brief description of the data

We can also know information about specific column, for example ‘user type’ column

For the code check this link.

Let’s start exploring:

Because we will work with dates , we will import Time.

And of course, we will need to import pandas and numpy as well.

In this project we want the user to input the city , month and day the user want to do calculation on. Any user input can be be classified into 2 types,

valid input

Invalid input , here, a problem will rise!

Therefore, we have to have a way to know whether the entries are valid or not.

Accordingly, There must be a reference with which we can compare the user input to make sure that it is valid.

These references in our code will be :

A dictionary that contains the names of cities as keys mapped to the csv file of each city as values
List contains months of the year
Another list contains days of the week

Also, one of the most common mistakes is the difference in letter case.

For example, we want the user to input "chicago", but the user inputs "Chicago" or "CHICAGO", the city name itself isn't the problem, it's spelled right, but the problem is in the deference in letter case, this difference will make the input invalid too.

In order to avoid this problem, we must convert all input characters to be either uppercase or lowercase before dealing with it and checking whether it is valid or not.

I will convert all the characters to be lowercase using .lower() method.

So, first We need a function to filter the input into three categories: city name, month name and day name.