Baby Name App

Are you expecting? If you need help choosing a name for your new baby why not do some baby names research. I created the app and hosted it using heroku.

Baby Name Analyzer

The data for this project uses data from the Kaggle Datasets. However instead of using Google’s Big Query I chose to download the data myself from ssa.gov. The only problem with the data was it came in .txt files for each year from 1880 to 2016. In order to use this data I started out using R to clean and combine the data.

library(tidyverse)


df <- read.csv("data/yob1880.txt", header = FALSE) %>%
    rename(Name = V1, Gender = V2, n =  V3) %>%
    mutate(Year = 1880)

for(i in 1881:2016) {
  currentFile <- sprintf("data/yob%d.txt", i)
  df2 <- read.csv(currentFile, header = FALSE) %>%
    rename(Name = V1, Gender = V2, n =  V3) %>%
    mutate(Year = i)
  df <- rbind(df, df2)

}
df <- arrange(df, Name, Year)
write.csv(df, file = "data/names-all-years.csv")

After cleaning the data with both R and python and prototyping the app in both R shiny and python Dash frameworks I chose Dash. Two reasons include I am more comfortable with python and R Shiny was extremely slow possibly due to the size of the data.

Use the app to find the most popular names by gender and over a specific time range. Alternatively you can research specific names and see their popularity over time. Enjoy and happy baby name choosing.