Data Analysis¶

Exploratory Data Analysis¶

In this section, we mainly focus on three sub-reddit dataset: addiction, alcoholism and anxiety, other datasets contains same column and can be analyzed in a same way. Three cleaned datasets contain both pre and post pandemic records, as well as the feature we mainly focus on:substance_use_total.

Steps and Methods¶

Histogram: The distribution of substance_use_total before and after pandemic. x axis: bins. y axis: count of substance_use_total. This aim to get a comparison of the substance_use_total between th two period.
Time Series Plot: The count of substance_use_total trends over time(sum by month).x axis: date time. y axis: the total count of substance_use_total in a given month. This aim to get an overview of how the feature varies with time.

Output plots¶

Addiction¶

Addiction Histogram Addiction Time Series

Alcoholism¶

Alcoholism Histogram Alcoholism Time Series

Anxiety¶

Anxiety Histogram Anxiety Time Series

Summary¶

From the histogram above, pre COVID records is more than the post COVID records, results is not intuitive because we have only 3 months for post pandemic while 11 months for pre pandemic. For the time series plot, the records slumped at Nov, 2019. Despite of this, the count appeared to increase after Jan, 2020 in all time series plots, especially for anxiety.

The results are not convincing so that we need to conduct statistical test to see if there existed statistically signifcant significant difference between median number of references to substance abuse per reddit-post when comparing the ‘pre-COVID’ and ‘post-COVID’ datasets, and details can be found here

Covid Reddit Behaviour