Multiple Linear Regression predicting-age of abalone

Can you estimate the age of an abalone?

📖 Background

You are working as an intern for an abalone farming operation in Japan. For operational and environmental reasons, it is an important consideration to estimate the age of the abalones when they go to market.

Determining an abalone's age involves counting the number of rings in a cross-section of the shell through a microscope. Since this method is somewhat cumbersome and complex, you are interested in helping the farmers estimate the age of the abalone using its physical characteristics.

Create a report that covers the following:

1. How does weight change with age for each of the three sex categories?
2. Can you estimate an abalone's age using its physical characteristics?
3. Investigate which variables are better predictors of age for abalones.

✅ Checklist before publishing

• Rename your workspace to make it descriptive of your work. N.B. you should leave the notebook name as notebook.ipynb.
• Remove redundant cells
• Check that all the cells run without error.

1. INTRODUCTION

Abalone (ab-ah-LOW-nee) is a large marine gastropod mollusk. The large sea snail is most often found in the cold waters of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Japan, and the west coast of North America. It has extremely rich,flavorful, and highly prized meat that is considered a culinary delicacy.Abalone is an excellent source of iron and pantothenic acid, is a nutritious food resource and farming in many parts of the world. 100 grams of abalone yields more than 20% recommended daily intake of these nutrients. Abalones have long been a valuable food source for humans in every area of the world where a species is abundant. The meat of this mollusc is considered a delicacy in certain parts of Latin America (especially Chile), France, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (especially in China, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea). Abalone pearl jewelry is very popular in New Zealand and Australia, in no minor part due to the marketing and farming efforts of pearl companies.The economic value of abalone is positively correlated with its age. Therefore, to detect the age of abalone accurately is important for both farmers and customers to determine its price. Getting access to the rings of an abalone involves cutting the shell. After polishing and staining, a lab technician examines a shell sample under a microscope and counts the rings. Because some rings are hard to make out using this method, the researchers believed adding 1.5 to the ring count is a reasonable approximation of the abalones age.This complex method increases the cost and limits its popularity. Our target is to find out the best indicators to forecast the rings, then the age of abalones.

Import Libraries

2 DATA PREPARATION

2.1 Feature data

You have access to the following historical data (source):

Abalone characteristics:

• "sex" - M, F, and I (infant).
• "length" - longest shell measurement.
• "diameter" - perpendicular to the length.
• "height" - measured with meat in the shell.
• "whole_wt" - whole abalone weight.
• "shucked_wt" - the weight of abalone meat.
• "viscera_wt" - gut-weight.
• "shell_wt" - the weight of the dried shell.
• "rings" - number of rings in a shell cross-section.
• "age" - the age of the abalone: the number of rings + 1.5.

Acknowledgments: Warwick J Nash, Tracy L Sellers, Simon R Talbot, Andrew J Cawthorn, and Wes B Ford (1994) "The Population Biology of Abalone (Haliotis species) in Tasmania. I. Blacklip Abalone (H. rubra) from the North Coast and Islands of Bass Strait", Sea Fisheries Division, Technical Report No. 48 (ISSN 1034-3288).

2.2 Read data

2.3 INSPECTING THE DATA

2.3.1 Types of variables

There are 4177 entries with 1 column of character and 9 columns of numeric type

• As seen sex is assigned as chracter type which needs transformed to factor type.