For our second project we will focus on data visualization using MATLAB. As you may know, data science is one of the most popular applications of computing today. Broadly speaking, data science is the use of algorithms to extract complex knowledge from large amounts of relatively simple bits of information. There is a lot to know in the vast area of data science today, but many times, the visualization of data is key to drawing conclusions or communicating knowledge in the field. You career as an engineer will surely require you to use data visualization techniques frequently in order to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams. MATLAB has extensive data visualization capabilities.
In this project, we will work with a particular set of data prepared by the Department of Justice: the National Prisoner Statistics. This dataset is the result of forty years of data collection on persons incarcerated in the US in state and federal prisons. Today, the National Prisoner Statistics provide a thorough enumeration on key characteristics of the US prison population and allows us to draw a detailed picture of the incarceration system. Looking at these data, we can conclude the US has the most incarcerated people in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. The incarceration rate in the US has increased by approximately 500% in the last 40 years, in part as a result of the increasingly severe punishment of drug-related offenses. This dramatic situation has not affected all people equally though: Black men in the US are six times as likely to be incarcerated as White men and Latinos are 2.5 times as likely. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. For more information on the US incarceration system and the possibility of reform, I recommend visiting the website ofThe Sentencing Project(Links to an external site.).
Your goal in this project is to build an application to visualize incarceration data on a state-by-state level as well as the national level over a period of several decades. You will do this through a graphical user interface (GUI) that will allow the user to input a desired year and a specific incarceration metric to get a detailed map of the United States showing all states colored by the chosen metric. The GUI must also show the historical trend of incarceration for the same metric at the national level and highlight the chosen year. The GUI must work continuously, which means the user must be able to continue to enter different years and/or incarceration metrics and get correct results without re-launching the application from scratch. The video below explains the correct functioning of the GUI with more detail.
A successful submission for this project will achieve the following:
- Read the incarceration data provided (all files can be found in the files section of our course site) and store the information in a MATLAB data structure. Given the functions that will be used in this project, Istronglysuggest you use thetabledata structure.(10 pts)
- Create a GUI that contains an US map with states colored according to the incarceration data, a 2D plot of national-level incarcerations over time, some objects (textbox, dropdown menu, etc.) for the user to input their chosen year and metric, and a plot button.(20 pts)
- Update the GUI whenever the user inputs a year and/or metric and pushes the plot button to showallstates with their corresponding color in the given year. The plot of national-level incarcerations over time must also be updatedevery timeto highlight the year chosen by the user. Istronglyrecommend using thegeoshowfunction to plot incarceration data on the US map.(60 pts)
- Labelallfigures, buttons, axes, and plots to provide necessary information. This includes a color legend for the US map data as shown in the video.(10 pts)
- (Optional)A checkbox or other interactive object allowing the user to switch from raw incarceration data (absolute numbers) to data per thousand people (relative numbers). To do this, I have provided a separate data file with the population of each state (and the national total) for every year considered.(10 pts extra credit)
You mustturn in your files normally without putting them in a zipped folder.