Skip to content

Who Do You Love?

Are Americans dog people or cat people?

An analysis of cats and dogs in the United States, from a publicly available dataset obtained from Kaggle.

This is my first attempt at my own data analysis project. I've compeleted some guided projects on DataCamp, and wanted to see how well I could do one on my own. I am, however, still a beginner.

This analysis will attempt to answer some questions about this dataset.

  1. What states have the most dog-owner households? What states have the most cat-owner households?
  2. What is the total dog and cat population by state?
  3. What is the total dog and cat population of the entire USA?
  4. What portion of households are pet-less households, cat-only households, dog-only households, and dog and cat households?
  5. Do Americans show a preference for one pet over the other?
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

pets = pd.read_csv('cats_and_dogs.csv')

EDA

First I'll take a look at the dataset in order to see what information is in the rows and columns, and look for any missing values

pets.head()
pets.info()

Luckily, no missing values

pets.describe()

Question 1

Which states own the most dogs? Which states own the most cats?

I will sort the rows based on the 'percent_dog_owners' columns in order to rank order the top dog-owning states. I'll do the same with the 'percent_cat_owners' column.

top_dog_states = pets.sort_values('percent_dog_owners', ascending=False).drop(index=pets.index[10:])
top_dog_states
top_cat_states = pets.sort_values('percent_cat_owners', ascending=False).drop(index=pets.index[10:])
top_cat_states
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(12,4))

ax[0].bar(top_dog_states['state'], top_dog_states['percent_dog_owners'], color='lightblue')
ax[0].set_title('Top 10 dog owner states')
ax[0].set_xticklabels(top_dog_states['state'], rotation=75)
ax[0].set_xlabel('States with highest % of dog owners')
ax[0].set_ylabel('% of homes with dogs')

ax[1].bar(top_cat_states['state'], top_cat_states['percent_cat_owners'], color='lightcoral')
ax[1].set_title('Top 10 cat owner states')
ax[1].set_xticklabels(top_cat_states['state'], rotation=75)
ax[1].set_xlabel('States with highest % of cat owners')
ax[1].set_ylabel('% of homes with cats')

plt.show()

Answer to Question 1: The graph shown above provides the top 10 dog-owning and cat-owning states in the USA. Dog-owner states have higher percentages of dog homes, than the cat-owner states.

Question 2

What is the total dog and cat population by state, and nationwide?

‌
‌
‌