TitanicR Documentation

Survival of passengers on the Titanic

Description

This data set provides information on the fate of passengers on the fatal maiden voyage of the ocean liner ‘Titanic’, summarized according to economic status (class), sex, age and survival.

Usage

Titanic

Format

A 4-dimensional array resulting from cross-tabulating 2201 observations on 4 variables. The variables and their levels are as follows:

No Name Levels
1 Class 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Crew
2 Sex Male, Female
3 Age Child, Adult
4 Survived No, Yes

Details

The sinking of the Titanic is a famous event, and new books are still being published about it. Many well-known facts—from the proportions of first-class passengers to the ‘women and children first’ policy, and the fact that that policy was not entirely successful in saving the women and children in the third class—are reflected in the survival rates for various classes of passenger.

These data were originally collected by the British Board of Trade in their investigation of the sinking. Note that there is not complete agreement among primary sources as to the exact numbers on board, rescued, or lost.

Due in particular to the very successful film ‘Titanic’, the last years saw a rise in public interest in the Titanic. Very detailed data about the passengers is now available on the Internet, at sites such as Encyclopedia Titanica (http://www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/phind).

Source

Dawson, Robert J. MacG. (1995), The ‘Unusual Episode’ Data Revisited. Journal of Statistics Education, 3. https://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v3n3/datasets.dawson.html

The source provides a data set recording class, sex, age, and survival status for each person on board of the Titanic, and is based on data originally collected by the British Board of Trade and reprinted in:

British Board of Trade (1990), Report on the Loss of the ‘Titanic’ (S.S.). British Board of Trade Inquiry Report (reprint). Gloucester, UK: Allan Sutton Publishing.

Examples

require(graphics)
mosaicplot(Titanic, main = "Survival on the Titanic")
## Higher survival rates in children?
apply(Titanic, c(3, 4), sum)
## Higher survival rates in females?
apply(Titanic, c(2, 4), sum)
## Use loglm() in package 'MASS' for further analysis ...