UFO Sightings

Exploring UFO sightings across the country

Author

Team Charmander
Aishwarya Gupta, Matthew Roohan, Noorejehan Umar, Senhuang Cai

Published

December 9, 2023

Topic and Data

  • UFO Sightings across the USA 🛸

  • Data from National UFO Reporting Center

  • Our main motivation was to make information about UFOs more accessible and give users the power to explore them on their own.

Highlights from EDA

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
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✔ lubridate 1.9.2     ✔ tidyr     1.3.0
✔ purrr     1.0.2     
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Attaching package: 'scales'


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Rows: 110265 Columns: 13
── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Delimiter: ","
chr  (6): City, State, Shape, Duration, Summary, Event_URL
dbl  (5): Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute
dttm (1): Event_Time
date (1): Event_Date

ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
Rows: 1317 Columns: 13
── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Delimiter: ","
chr  (9): posted, date, city, state, shape, duration, summary, images, img_link
dbl  (3): lat, lng, population
time (1): time

ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

Highlights from EDA

Highlights from EDA

`summarise()` has grouped output by 'month'. You can override using the
`.groups` argument.

Our Approach

  • Shiny App

    • Gives users the power to explore

    • More user-friendly than a scientific report or poster

    • Adds a fun element

    • Demo

Conclusions + future work

  • Future Steps

    • User testing to make app more user-friendly

    • Add more content that users may find interesting

  • Reflection

    • R can be used for many purposes - educational, personal, fun

    • Space exploration very big in USA, would be interesting to see how it evolves in the rest of the world