Improving the whiskey distillery data set

Loading the whiskey data set

The original data set can be loaded from the web in the following way:

library(RCurl)
# load data as character
f <- getURL('https://www.datascienceblog.net/data-sets/whiskies.txt')
# read table from text connection
df <- read.csv(textConnection(f), header=T)

Fixing the post codes

Since there are tab characters and spaces in the post codes, we will clean those up:

head(df)

##   RowID  Distillery Body Sweetness Smoky Medicinal Tobacco Honey Spicy Winey
## 1     1   Aberfeldy    2         2     2         0       0     2     1     2
## 2     2    Aberlour    3         3     1         0       0     4     3     2
## 3     3      AnCnoc    1         3     2         0       0     2     0     0
## 4     4      Ardbeg    4         1     4         4       0     0     2     0
## 5     5     Ardmore    2         2     2         0       0     1     1     1
## 6     6 ArranIsleOf    2         3     1         1       0     1     1     1
##   Nutty Malty Fruity Floral    Postcode Latitude Longitude
## 1     2     2      2      2  \tPH15 2EB   286580    749680
## 2     2     3      3      2  \tAB38 9PJ   326340    842570
## 3     2     2      3      2   \tAB5 5LI   352960    839320
## 4     1     2      1      0  \tPA42 7EB   141560    646220
## 5     2     3      1      1  \tAB54 4NH   355350    829140
## 6     0     1      1      2    KA27 8HJ   194050    649950

df$Postcode <- gsub(" *\t*", "", df$Postcode)

Annotating the locations of the distilleries

A blog post by Koki Ando gives a nice overview of how UTM data can be handled. In the following code snippet, we use the raster and sp packages to create a SpatialPoints object from latitude/longitude coordinates in UTM format. Then, we add UK as a reference point system by specifying +init=epsg:27700" (see epsg.io for other reference coordinates). Finally, we call spTransform with WGS84 (+init=epsg:4326) in order to set the world geodetic system, which is used for GPS.

# transform UTM coordinates to longitude/latitude in degrees
geo.df <- df[, c("Latitude", "Longitude")]
colnames(geo.df) <- c("lat", "long") # switch for plotting
library(raster)
# create 'SpatialPoints' object
coordinates(geo.df) <-  ~lat + long
# add coordinate reference system (CRS) for UK
proj4string(geo.df) <- CRS("+init=epsg:27700")
# transform to new coordinate system
# NB: getting rgdal working on old systems is tough due to libgdal dependency
library(rgdal)
geo.df <- spTransform(geo.df, CRS("+init=epsg:4326"))
map.df <- data.frame("Distillery" = df[, "Distillery"], geo.df)
df <- cbind(df, map.df[, c("lat", "long")])

Other annotations

To annotate the regions in which the distilleries are situated, I manually assigned regions by relying on a list of Scottisch distilleries available at Wikipedia. I also fixed some spelling errors in the distillery names.

The improved whiskey data set

The improved whiskey data set is available here.