Titanic. A look back, with Data.

After I watched Titanic for the first time in 1998 as a 9 year old boy, I immediately felt in love with the movie. I went on watch countless time with the VHS and DVD I owned and in the theatre whenever it was remastered.

To this day, Titanic is still my favorite movie of all times! Thank you James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet!

figure 1. Titanic Movie

Enough of the movie, lets get into data!

Fact: Today, April 14, 2020, marks 108 years of Titanic’s tragic night in middle of the Atlantic.

figure 2. Image taken in 1912

After this tragic event, information were gathered about those who survived and those of unfortunate. Out of total passengers of about 2,200 including the crew members, only about 800survived. A survival rate of about 36%.

Today, we will use the train Titanic dataset from kaggle to take a deeper look into Titanic with numbers. Although unrealistic, we can use data to predict who are more likely to survive that tragic night. You can also imagine yourself in perspective to see your likelihood of survival.

Lets take a dive into this dataset.

In this dataset, it has total of 891 passengers. The survival rate in this dataset is about 36%. Given the dataset is about 40% of the total passenger, this is a big enough of a sample size to present the Titanic population.

During the 1900, a person’s privileges was heavily defined by the person’s wealth, title and gender. Some of these factors still exist today. Therefore, we focus on these parameter to see its affects on Titanic.

Survival rate between the genders:

figure 3. Male and Female Survival Rate

In figure 3, the survival rate of female were twice the total of male. According, to history, the women and children were allow to board the life boat first.

The survival rate between the different title:

figure 4. Title vs survival rate.

As we can see in figure 4, people with high nobility or honorable titles helped increase survival rate as they were given special privileges.

After the title were broken into genders:

figure 5. title vs gender

According to figure 5, Titanic didn’t carry too many female with honorable titles and all of them survived. On the other hand, male with title were mainly Master.

Since the female title were very honorable. no doubt they were in first class. But, how about the different title in male?

figure 6. class vs. title

Master was the only title dominated in class 2 and class 3.

The survival rate for Class 1 was 62.62%, Class 2 was 47.28%, and Class 3 was 24.24%. In addition, the survival rate for children under 12 in Class 1 was 75%, Class 2 was 100%, Class 3 was 40.43%.

After we combined these data with the age distribution of the survival between male and female, figure 7, we can understand who were the unfortunate group.

figure 7. survivor age distribution between male and female.

In figure 7, the average, indicated by the red line, age for women was higher than men and women was more distributed between age from about 15 to 45. But for men, the most survivor were aged younger than 5 and between 25 to to about 35.

The survival rate of male was only about 30%. Within those 30%, many were mainly children below age of 10 who were able to leave with their mom and men with honorable titles. Therefore, the most unfortunate group was class 3 men without any title between the age of about 10 to 25 and above 45.

Based on this data, if I were to board on the Titanic today at age 30, I might be able to fight my way through and survived. Just a thought.

Although this even was very tragic, Titanic changed the safety requirements for commercial ocean liners. It mandated each ship to have enough life boat for the its maximum capacity.

This is my commemoration for Titanic.