Dashboard Week is upon us and this week we’re kicking off with our first dataset – US Boating Accidents.
The US Coast Guard maintains data on recreational boating accident reports and includes but not limited to details about each accidents, vessels, death and injury involved, weather conditions, substance use and causation of incidents. I began with reading the documentation thoroughly before deciding on the story angle I wanted to go ahead with. The dataset was extremely rich so I decided to focus specifically down into the number of deaths and whether substance use is a major contributing factor in boating deaths.
Upon reviewing the data, the most pressing issue I sighted was the incorrect data input of the States. For instance, Atlantic Ocean was label as a State (AT) or the Gulf of Mexico as GM. I was able to correct the data by cross referencing the other available data of ‘county’ or ‘closest town’ to determine the correct State.
Overall, the findings were not very surprising. The dashboard explores the death toll by gender, age, season of the year, time of the week/day, location and cause of death. Here’s a sneak peak of the dashboard below otherwise, you can click here to see the final dashboard on Tableau Public 🙂
