Part 3: Plotting Candy Power Rankings

Task 1: Plot the Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Rankings

The website fivethirtyeight.com has an Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Ranking. The ranking comes from asking users to choose their preferred candy froma selection of two. Data was collected from about 269,000 matchups and from 8,371 different IP addresses.

We will be using this data, which is stored in a variable called candy in candyData.py in your plotting folder. Import this file so you can access the candy variable.

Task 1a: View the data in `candyData.py` so you understand the structure.

Task 1b: Write `makeCandyPlot()`

Your makeCandyPlot function takes 2 parameters: data and how many of the top ranked candies to plot. Note that all 3 of the examples below are plotted from the same function. The user specifies how many of the top candies are to be plotted. The plots show the most selected candy (Reese's) at top. The makeCandyPlot function also saves each plot in a filename that as indicated in the examples below.

Example 1i

makeCandyPlot(candy,7)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTop7.png`

Example 1ii

makeCandyPlot(candy,20)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTop20.png`

Example 1iii

makeCandyPlot(candy,50)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTop50.png`

Task 1c: Check your `lab09` folder for the newly generated plots

If your working directory is set to be your lab09 folder, then look inside that folder and check that plots are correctly saved.

Task 2: Plot the Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Rankings over a given percentage

In this task, instead of pulling a specific number of data entries, we will select our data set based on the percentage of wins that the user specifies. For example, if the user selects 75%, then we will plot all candy that has a percentage greater than 75%.

Task 2a: `makeCandyPlotByPercentage`

This function takes two parameters: the data and the winning percentage cutoff. It plots all the candy that has a winning percentage higher than the given cutoff.

Example 2i

makeCandyPlotByPercentage(candy,80)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTopPercentGreaterThan80.png`

Example 2ii

makeCandyPlotByPercentage(candy,70)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTopPercentGreaterThan70.png`

Example 2iii

makeCandyPlotByPercentage(candy,50)
# saves the plot in a file called `candyTopPercentGreaterThan50.png`

Task 2b: Verify that plots are created

Check your lab09 folder to make sure that the corresponding plots were created there (e.g. candyTopPercentGreaterThan50.png, and others).