aarthi-subramanian/lefties-vs-righties

Death data on lefties vs. righties

Lefties Vs. Righties

Background

• A 1991 study alleged that left-handed humans (lefties) die, on average, 9 years earlier than right-handed humans (righties). Oof!
• Here, we will leverage age distribution data to see if we can replicate this phenomenon on the basis of changing rates of left-handedness over time.
• We will incorporate 2 datasets for our analysis: 1999 US death distribution data, and 1992 rates of left-handedness.
• We'll explore this data to plot the rates of left-handedness as a function of age, and try to understand the effect of changing handedness on the mean death age of lefties.

Key skills

Pandas data cleaning and manipulation, bayesian probability and statistics, matplotlib data visualisation.

References

Gilbert AN, Wysocki CJ. Hand preference and age in the United States. Neuropsychologia. 1992 Jul;30(7):601-8. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(92)90065-t. PMID: 1528408.

Halpern DF, Coren S. Handedness and life span. N Engl J Med. 1991 Apr 4;324(14):998. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199104043241418. PMID: 2002827.

C. (2016, December 16). NVSS - Mortality Tables. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/mortality_tables.htm

D. (n.d.). DataCamp projects. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://learn.datacamp.com/projects/479