bike_sharing
A city put in place a bike sharing system a year ago. Through this system, users are able to easily rent a bike from a particular station and return it back at another station (possibly the same). There are complaints that some stations often have no bike available to rent. The logistics to make sure there are enough bikes available at all renting stations is complex and partially based on the duration of the bike ride for each user. Municipal employees have noticed that the ride duration tends to be longer when the weather is nice. If this is true, the municipal staff that moves bikes to empty stations could plan its activity in advance, based on weather forecasts, to improve bike availability. The manager of the bike sharing program wants to be sure that weather influences the bike ride duration and hires you as a data analyst consultant to study this.
The manager provides a dataset of 2,000 bike rides randomly selected over the last year in the file bike trips.csv as well as the file bike stations.csv that translates in English the bike stations names from numerical codes. You also have access to weather data for the city in the file bike weather.csv . The file bike INFO.txt contains important additional information about those three files.
a) Merge the information from all three datasets (about bike rides, station names and weather) in a single table that must have the following format (note that the codes for weather and stations are replaced by their “names”):
| day | station start | station end | duration weather |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BotanicalGardens | MainStreetSouth | 56.78 |
| 1 | MontagueStreet | MontagueStreet | 12.34 |
| 1 | BakerStreet | AdelaideStreet | 8.76 |
| 1 | TrainStation | BotanicalGardens | 6.31 |
| 2 | ShoppingMall | CravenAvenue | 69.31 |
| ··· | ··· | ··· | ··· |
The table above is illustrative and does not represent the values of the actual data contained in the file. The variable duration is the duration of the bike ride in minutes.
Hint: this question involves several steps of joining tables.
b) Produce and display a table that summarizes the average bike ride duration for each of the four types of weather. Create a well-annotated boxplot that shows the distribution of bike ride durations by weather type.
c) Conduct a rigorous statistical analysis that determines if the bike ride durations differs with the type of weather. Write a short paragraph that summarizes your analysis.