R Dataset / Package datasets / swiss
On this R-data statistics page, you will find information about the swiss data set which pertains to Swiss Fertility and Socioeconomic Indicators (1888) Data. The swiss data set is found in the datasets R package. You can load the swiss data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("swiss"). This will load the data into a variable called swiss. If R says the swiss data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("datasets") and then attempt to reload the data with the library() command. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the swiss R data set. The size of this file is about 1,660 bytes.
Swiss Fertility and Socioeconomic Indicators (1888) Data
Description
Standardized fertility measure and socio-economic indicators for each of 47 French-speaking provinces of Switzerland at about 1888.
Usage
swiss
Format
A data frame with 47 observations on 6 variables, each of which is in percent, i.e., in [0, 100].
[,1] | Fertility | Ig, ‘common standardized fertility measure’ |
[,2] | Agriculture | % of males involved in agriculture as occupation |
[,3] | Examination | % draftees receiving highest mark on army examination |
[,4] | Education | % education beyond primary school for draftees. |
[,5] | Catholic | % ‘catholic’ (as opposed to ‘protestant’). |
[,6] | Infant.Mortality | live births who live less than 1 year. |
All variables but ‘Fertility’ give proportions of the population.
Details
(paraphrasing Mosteller and Tukey):
Switzerland, in 1888, was entering a period known as the demographic transition; i.e., its fertility was beginning to fall from the high level typical of underdeveloped countries.
The data collected are for 47 French-speaking “provinces” at about 1888.
Here, all variables are scaled to [0, 100], where in the original, all but "Catholic"
were scaled to [0, 1].
Note
Files for all 182 districts in 1888 and other years have been available at https://opr.princeton.edu/archive/pefp/switz.aspx.
They state that variables Examination
and Education
are averages for 1887, 1888 and 1889.
Source
Project “16P5”, pages 549–551 in
Mosteller, F. and Tukey, J. W. (1977) Data Analysis and Regression: A Second Course in Statistics. Addison-Wesley, Reading Mass.
indicating their source as “Data used by permission of Franice van de Walle. Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 1976. Unpublished data assembled under NICHD contract number No 1-HD-O-2077.”
References
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.
Examples
require(stats); require(graphics) pairs(swiss, panel = panel.smooth, main = "swiss data", col = 3 + (swiss$Catholic > 50)) summary(lm(Fertility ~ . , data = swiss))
Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.