5 Spooky Data Stories (That I Wish I Could Have Written)
By: Ryan Harrington
Tags: Data Stories, Halloween, Data Science, Data

Halloween is a storied holiday — a huge part of American culture. There are so many wonderful components that make the holiday a cultural event. First of all, there’s candy. But if you don’t have a sweet tooth then there are the elaborate costumes. If dressing up isn’t your thing, then you can carve yourself a pumpkin. And if all of that fails, there are always some amazing movies to fall back on.

For a data scientist, it’s the ideal time to write a data story. And I tried. I tried a lot of times. I started. I stopped. I pivoted. And still, there was no story to be written. Why is that? It all comes down to the data.

One of the first lessons that any data adjacent person will learn is that no matter how much you want to do a project, you can’t do it without the right data. Sometimes there are solutions for that, but other times the solutions will remain frustratingly far out of reach. That’s what happened on this attempt to write a data story.

Still, there are some phenomenal Halloween data stories waiting to be told. Here are some of the stories that I would love to see explored. Perhaps with some more planning or access to the right data, someone else could tell it.

Which neighborhoods are the best for trick-or-treating?

At CompassRed, we love candy. Perhaps too much. At our office we end up spending a lot of time talking about which neighborhood in our hometown of Wilmington, DE will be the best for trick-or-treating (office consensus is that it’s a tough call between the Highlands and the Triangle).

Some of the CompassRed team celebrating a near-endless amount of Wispas.

What if we could end the debate and quantify the best trick-or-treating neighborhoods? What data would it take to do that?

Anecdotally, good trick-or-treating neighborhoods seem to be a function of density and wealth. How could we answer the most important question, though — which neighborhoods are most likely to give out the ever-coveted full-size candy bars? Once again, wealth is probably a function of that too, but doesn’t tell the full story. To really answer the question we need more data — preferably location-based grocery store data for September and October.

How are the rise of food allergies going to impact trick-or-treater candy preferences?

Food allergies are on the rise. “The prevalence of food allergy in children increased by 50 percent between 1997 and 2001. Between 1997 and 2008, the prevalence of peanut or tree nut allergy appears to have more than tripled in U.S. children.” That’s a huge deal.

Certainly, these changes are going to have a dramatic effect on the type of candy that trick-or-treaters will want (look out for teal pumpkins!), but will those changes affect different areas of the country in different ways? Further, how have the changes over time differed across the country? To fully answer that question, we’d need access to longitudinal per capita food allergy rates at the lowest level of granularity possible.

What will be the most popular Halloween costumes this year?

Fat Thor. IT. Some character that I’m not familiar with from Fortnite. I feel extremely comfortable saying that we will see many of those costumes adorning our doorsteps this year. Can we quantify that, though? To pull that off, we’d need to get our hands on search trend data. Thankfully for this question, Google has us covered with Google Trends Frightgeist.

Another great question to ask from this, though, would be how have preferences around Halloween costumes changed over time? Could we see the rise and fall of traditional Halloween costumes — witches, ghosts, vampires, and all of the other monsters? Have the top costumes always been influenced by pop culture or has that influence changed over time? To answer those questions we need historical costume data. Google Trends would only take us back so far. To look back even further in time, we would need costume sales data.

What Halloween-related movies are most similar to each other?

If you’re less of a trick-or-treating person and more of a pajamas-and-a-scary-movie person, then you probably have favorite Halloween movies. There are a lot of nuances to the different types of Halloween movies that exist. Perhaps there is a way to quantify that nuance and find clusters of movies that share similar features. To tell this data story, you would potentially need to wrangle together a few different data sets — lists of Halloween (and Halloween adjacent movies), access to their scripts, or access to reviews about the movies.

If you had access to reviews of the movies, you could potentially build a model to predict the rating of a movie based upon the text of the review. Similarly, you could try to build a prediction for the rating based upon a plot summary.¹

What different types of jack o’lanterns are there?

One of my favorite parts of Halloween is carving pumpkins. Everyone takes a different approach to this task. Some people like to make the classic jack o’lantern. Others go for movie characters. Some people get super creative. Others go for hyper realistic. Could we quantify all of the different types of jack o’lanterns, though? To do this, we would definitely need access to the definitely-not-created-but-definitely-should-be ImageNet of pumpkins. Maybe by next year someone will make our dreams come true.

Happy Halloween!