Urban Big Data Analytics

Assignment 1 check in

• Gapminder offline tool
• Exploratory
• R
• R Studio
• QGIS

What are R and RStudio?

• Why two? not one?
• Open source software
• R is like an engine
• R Studio is like a dashboard

What is Exploratory?

• Graphical User Interface (GUI) for R
• Entirely based on tidyr language (more later)
• Make data wrangling a breeze
• User friendly and quick to learn

Exploratory

Open data platform

• Open data movement
• Smart cities, smart government
• More than 200 US cities/counties have open data
• Big cities leading the open data movement

NYC open data

NYC open data

• More than 1,500 datasets
• A broad range of topics: e.g. budget, crime
• So much data generated every minutes
• Big cities = big data = big tasks
• From big data to smart cities
• Most commonly accessed data

New school, new era

Chicago open data

Array of things

Array of things

Vancouver open data

Case study - Noise 311

Construction noise

Sources of urban noise

Vancouver 311 call center

Major Constructions

Construction and noise

Heatmap of construction

Heatmap of noise complaints

How to access open data?

• Traditional way: direct download and import data
• Programming way: Application Programming Interface (API)

API Demo (advanced material)

• Chicago Open Data - Crime Data
• R packages for using API endpoints: RCurl + jsonlite
• Base R code to access API endpoint

Group session

Group project part 1

Assignment 2

Any questions?