Exploratory Data Analysis with Maps

AP Exam Enrollment vs. Different Demographics

With the many predictors that we had, we wanted to do some exploratory data analysis while also looking at the locations of the schools. Building off of the previous section, we will be further exploring which demographics tend to take AP Exams more frequently than others.

For our first set of maps, we wanted to depict the percentage of AP Exams taken at each school relative to the percentage of different races at that school. Thus, in the following maps the color of the dots correspond to the percentage of students that took AP Examinations. A darker color means more students at those schools took AP Exams. The size of the dot corresponds to the percentage of different races at those schools. Below we picked 4 different demographics to be displayed: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. It should also be noted that these maps represent our data for the year 2011 only. This was done because the trends between the years tend to be quite similar.

Here we can see that both the Black and Asian population tend to cluster in the more populated areas, whereas both the Hispanic and White population are spread throughout most of California. There doesn’t seem to be any apparent similarities between the maps depicting White and Black students. That being said, in the maps that display the Asian and Hispanic populations, it seems like the darker colored dots tend to be larger in size. This implies that schools with a larger Asian or Hispanic population tend to have higher AP exam participation rates.

Analysis of AP Exam Enrollment vs AP Class Participation

In this map, the size of the dot corresponds to the % of AP course enrollment while the color of the dot corresponds to the % of AP exam participation. Based on this map, it appears that there may be a relationship between these two predictors as we see that generally throughout the years, the larger the dot, the darker the color. We will explore this relationship further in our modeling section.

Analysis of AP Exam Enrollment vs SAT and ACT Participation

This map is similar to the one above. In this scenario, the size of the dot now corresponds to the % of students that participated in ACT or SAT testing. The color still corresponds to the % of students that participated in AP exams. It appears that there also may be a relationship between these two variables. This relationship will also be explored further in our modeling section to conclude how important this feature is in explaining AP Exam enrollment.