Titanic Data Analysis - Did Passengers Get Their Money's Worth?

You may have read about the City of Charlotte's "Business Analysis Olympiad" where 12 teams of analysts from across the city departments competed in an analytical showdown. It was quite the event and Jock Mackinlay's blog post gives all the details. Data Administration Specialist Doris Phillips had the original idea to hold the Business Analysis Olympiad. And it was James Raper, Manager of Data Administration, who made the most of the suggestion and orchestrated the event.

Several weeks ago well before the Olympiad, Doris took the first crack at analyzing data about Titanic passengers. She shared her visual analysis with both the Oracle Developer Tools Users Group (ODTUG) and with us at Tableau. And were we knocked out by her work. Titanic buffs will of course enjoy this (there are a lot of people who study the Titanic story - and I don't mean the movie). But even if you don't have much of an interest in the fate of the Titanic, you'll still be fascinated by her visualization work.

It's not that the results are all that surprising - and it confirms what you may already think. That people who paid more for tickets tended to survive. Doris also shows that people in higher fare class tickets tended to survive and that females tended to survive over their male counterparts.

What's so cool is the way Doris was able to show these patterns so clearly on her dashboard. It's clean, clear and elegant. And she also made it easy to ask additional questions through the use of quick-filters. If you have Tableau Reader (a free application), you can interact directly with Doris' work and filter through class patterns, gender patterns and even embarcation location patterns. You can get Doris' packaged workbook here.

But if you have Tableau Desktop (even a free trial of Desktop), you can create new visualizations of the data. I couldn't help myself. I went for something simple - I looked at gender by fare class using Tableau's new pie charts. The pattern practically jumps off the page. You can't help but see that there is chivalry at work (i.e., women and children first). Just 19% of men survived while nearly 73% of women survived. Not suprisingly, the higher the fare class, the better the survival rate across gender.

So thank you, Doris, for sharing your work with us. We really enjoyed it. And I hope you Titanic buffs out there enjoy it too.

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