

How London cycle hire usage varies with weather - philh
http://reasonableapproximation.net/2015/08/19/cycle-hire-weather.html

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gus_massa
I like graphics, but this has too many graphics.

If I understood correctly, the bike usage almost don't depend on the rain.
This is very strange and unintuitive. Did I misread the article?

~~~
philh
I agree - if I hadn't been writing this to fit udacity's project evaluation
specs, I would probably have included fewer. (Even as it is, I guess many of
them should have been smaller.)

Bike usage depends noticeably on the rain, which is the only weather feature I
discover that it does depend on. Rain causes about a 20% drop. But many
caveats: abs(d.num.bikes) doesn't seem to be an especially good measure of
bike usage; rain is binary, not quantitative; and I'm not sure how much to
trust the rain variable anyway.

Also consider that lots of people use bikes for commuting, and may not have a
good alternative. (I have reasonable alternatives, but the rain is basically
never at a level that makes me take them instead of cycling.) I don't think I
looked at how rain interacted with weekends, but I just had a look and rain
causes about a 30% drop on weekends and 15% on weekdays.

    
    
          is.weekday  rain mean(abs(d.num.bikes))
        1      FALSE FALSE              0.4567856
        2      FALSE  TRUE              0.3115902
        3       TRUE FALSE              0.5343955
        4       TRUE  TRUE              0.4595437

~~~
gus_massa
Interesting. You may copy the graphic of the main result to the beginning of
the page with these data, something like a long tl;dr with two or three
paragraphs.

Reformatting all the article and graphs is a lot of work, specially if the
main objective is other. But a nice abstract with the main result helps the
reader to understand what is the interesting part and find it with all the
details later.

~~~
philh
Out of interest, what if anything would you say the main result is? I don't
have one in mind, which I think harms the post - there's no narrative, just a
bunch of questions and answers. The three final plots are there because the
spec required them, and I chose them more because the plots themselves seemed
interesting than for the questions they answered.

But you're right that an abstract would have helped, and I feel a little
embarrassed that I didn't think to include one myself. Even without a single
main result, I could have included a short list of interesting findings.

~~~
gus_massa
(For a blog post) You can declare whatever you like as the main result. I
think that the % of the reduction of the bike use by the rain is good
candidate. Choose a nice small fact that you can tell to your friend during
lunch. Think about the linkbait version: "You can't believe how much the bike
use is reduced by rain ..." but please use a non linkbait title, because I
hate them.

Usually the biggest change is a good candidate. For example "Moon phase reduce
the bike use a 0.027% with p<.99" is a very bad selection.

When you have more time, I think that classifying the rainy days as "small
drizzle" and "heavy thunderstorm" will make the changes bigger. I've never
been there, but London if not famous for being sunny, so I guess people just
ignore the drizzle.

