Bowley: Bowley's data on values of British and Irish trade, 1855-1899

In HistData: Data Sets from the History of Statistics and Data Visualization

Description

In one of the first statistical textbooks, Arthur Bowley (1901) used these data to illustrate an arithmetic and graphical analysis of time-series data using the total value of British and Irish exports from 1855-1899. He presented a line graph of the time-series data, supplemented by overlaid line graphs of 3-, 5- and 10-year moving averages. His goal was to show that while the initial series showed wide variability, moving averages made the series progressively smoother.

Usage

data(Bowley)

Format

A data frame with 45 observations on the following 2 variables.

Year

Year, from 1855-1899

Value

total value of British and Irish exports (millions of Pounds)

Source

Bowley, A. L. (1901). Elements of Statistics. London: P. S. King and Son, p. 151-154.

Digitized from Bowley's graph.

Examples

data(Bowley)

# plot the data 
with(Bowley,plot(Year, Value, type='b', 
	ylab="Value of British and Irish Exports",
	main="Bowley's example of the method of smoothing curves"))

# find moving averages-- use center alignment (requires width=ODD)
require(gtools, warn.conflicts=FALSE)
mav3<-running(Bowley$Value, width=3, align="center")
mav5<-running(Bowley$Value, width=5, align="center")
mav9<-running(Bowley$Value, width=9, align="center")
lines(Bowley$Year[2:44], mav3, col='blue', lty=2)
lines(Bowley$Year[3:43], mav5, col='green3', lty=3)
lines(Bowley$Year[5:41], mav9, col='brown', lty=4)

# add lowess smooth
lines(lowess(Bowley), col='red', lwd=2)

require(ggplot2, warn.conflicts=FALSE)
qplot(Year,Value, data=Bowley)+geom_smooth()

Example output

Loading required package: gtools
Loading required package: ggplot2
`geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess'

HistData documentation built on May 2, 2019, 5:15 p.m.