Project 1L: Alcohol Use By Country

Overview

This data set contains data on alcohol consumption per capita across countries in the world.

Details

This data set comes from the World Health Organization via FiveThirtyEight’s Github page, and is discussed in a blog post: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dear-mona-followup-where-do-people-drink-the-most-beer-wine-and-spirits/

It contains data on average alcohol consumption by country among those 15 and older, in 2010, separately by beverage type. Values provided are the average number of servings in three categories (beer, wine, and spirits). The data were obtained from: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/alcohol-consumption

Data Description

Variable	Description
country	Name of Country
beer_servings	Number of beer servings per capita
spirit_servings	Number of spirit servings per capita
wine_servings	Number of wine servings per capita

alcohol_data = read.csv("data/drinks.csv")
alcohol_data = alcohol_data[, 2:5]
head(alcohol_data)

Data Files

• drinks.csv

Objectives

We will consider modeling the average consumption of beer, wine, and spirits across countries. The goal is to find distributions that fit these data well, and to estimate the associated parameters, as well as to produce maps displaying information on alcohol consumption across countries.

• Provide numerical and graphical summaries of the average number of beer, wine, and spirit servings per capita per country.
• Consider fitting some of the known distributions discussed in class, both this semester and last semester, to these variables. For each distribution you consider, explain how you are estimating the relevant parameters (e.g., are you using the MLEs? MOMs? etc.). Consider at least two different distributions for each of the variables.
• Provide some assessment of fit of the distributions to the data. For example, q-q plots are useful for this purpose.
• Produce maps of the world, color-coded by the relative levels of alcohol consumption. The R package rworldmap is a good place to start.