Predicting the age of abalone from physical measurements
📖 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.
💾 The data
For this project, we have access to the following historical data (source):
Relationship between whole weight and age
For each of the three sex categories, it can be seen that weight increases with increasing age, but obviously not in a linear fashion.
Male and Female abalones seem to share the the same or similar characteristics as their data points show similar patterns.
How old is this Abalone?
Exploring correlation among numerical attributes
The correlation coefficient (Pearson correlation) ranges from -1 to 1, where values close to 1 mean that there is a strong positive correlation while values close to -1 indicate the presence of strong negative correlations. Interestingly, all the correlation coefficients are positive. Unsurprisingly, there is a perfect correlation between rings and the age of abalones since we know from the data description that the age is nothing but the number of rings plus the constant 1.5. It will therefore be prudent to remove the rings attribute from the set of predictors at the modeling phase. The remaining seven atrributes tend to be highly correlated with one another, which may lead to a problem of multicollinearity for some Machine Learning algorithms (e.g., linear regression).
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).