Read Baby Name Data#

The US authorities have registered the names of all US citizens born since 1880. The record is publicly available.

In this and the following chapters, you will to analyze this data. If you want to use the pandas library, you find a list of useful functions at the bottom.

Preparations#

Download the dataset of US baby names from www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
start with the national data
Unzip the file

Note

To protect individuals, only name/gender combinations that occur at least 5 times are listed in the data record. Also, the table contains genders assigned at birth. Although more genders exist, only two of them are in the data.

Task 1#

Inspect the file yob2021.txt in a text editor. What do you observe about the structure of the file?

Usually these questions are the most relevant:

How many columns are there?
How are columns separated?
Is there a header on top of the files?

Task 2#

Read the file ‘yob2021.txt’ into pandas.

Task 3#

Print the first 10 rows.

Task 4#

Display the number of rows and columns.

Task 5#

Calculate the total number of babies born in 2021, i.e. the sum of the third column.

Task 6#

Like Task 5, but calculate the sum for boys and girls separately.

Task 7#

Check if your name occurs in the data.

Task 8#

Calculate the percentage of girls and boys among the total births.

Task 9#

Create a table that contains the top 5 girls names and top 5 boys names.

Task 10#

Write the data from task 9 to an Excel spreadsheet.

Useful pandas functions#

function	comment
`pd.read_csv()`	set `index_col` to 0 or 1
`df.head(x)`	`x` is a number
`df.shape`	this is an attribute, not a method
`df.sum()`	also try to select a column first
`df[df[col] == x]`	selection logic
`pd.concat[list]`	concatenates DataFrames. `list` is a list of DataFrames
`df.to_excel(fn)`	`fn` is a path/filename