faithfulR Documentation

Old Faithful Geyser Data

Description

Waiting time between eruptions and the duration of the eruption for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA.

Usage

faithful

Format

A data frame with 272 observations on 2 variables.

[,1] eruptions numeric Eruption time in mins
[,2] waiting numeric Waiting time to next eruption (in mins)

Details

A closer look at faithful$eruptions reveals that these are heavily rounded times originally in seconds, where multiples of 5 are more frequent than expected under non-human measurement. For a better version of the eruption times, see the example below.

There are many versions of this dataset around: Azzalini and Bowman (1990) use a more complete version.

Source

W. Härdle.

References

Härdle, W. (1991). Smoothing Techniques with Implementation in S. New York: Springer.

Azzalini, A. and Bowman, A. W. (1990). A look at some data on the Old Faithful geyser. Applied Statistics, 39, 357–365. doi:10.2307/2347385.

See Also

geyser in package MASS for the Azzalini–Bowman version.

Examples

require(stats); require(graphics)
f.tit <-  "faithful data: Eruptions of Old Faithful"

ne60 <- round(e60 <- 60 * faithful$eruptions)
all.equal(e60, ne60)             # relative diff. ~ 1/10000
table(zapsmall(abs(e60 - ne60))) # 0, 0.02 or 0.04
faithful$better.eruptions <- ne60 / 60
te <- table(ne60)
te[te >= 4]                      # (too) many multiples of 5 !
plot(names(te), te, type = "h", main = f.tit, xlab = "Eruption time (sec)")

plot(faithful[, -3], main = f.tit,
     xlab = "Eruption time (min)",
     ylab = "Waiting time to next eruption (min)")
lines(lowess(faithful$eruptions, faithful$waiting, f = 2/3, iter = 3),
      col = "red")