🥑 Avocado Prices Analysis in R

📖 Story & Motivation

This project was born out of curiosity about how avocado prices change across time, regions, and types. I wanted to explore a real-world dataset that combines both economic and agricultural perspectives. The Avocado Prices dataset from Kaggle provided the perfect playground: structured, rich, yet simple enough to analyze with the tools we learned in class.

🔍 Project Flow

The journey of this analysis unfolded in three main steps:

1️⃣ Getting to Know the Data

• Imported the CSV dataset into R.
• Explored its structure with str(), summary(), and head().
• Checked for missing values and unique counts per column.
• This step helped me understand the variables before diving deeper.

2️⃣ Detecting Outliers

• Focused on AveragePrice, Total.Volume, and Total.Bags.
• Used boxplots to reveal unusual values.
• Outliers gave insight into extreme cases of pricing and sales volume that could impact analysis.

3️⃣ Visual Storytelling with Plots

• Histogram of Average Price → to see how prices are distributed.
• Histogram of log(Total Volume) → log transform made skewed values easier to interpret.
• Scatter plot of Price vs Log(Volume) → revealed the relationship between sales volume and pricing.

4️⃣ Predictive Modeling with Decision Trees

• Built a Decision Tree regression model using log-transformed variables.
• Split the dataset into training (80%) and testing (20%).
• Visualized the tree and calculated Mean Squared Error (MSE).
• The model achieved a low error (~0.07), showing it captured the key patterns well.

📊 Results & Insights

• Outliers highlighted unusual pricing and sales activity.
• Visualizations clarified data distribution and trends.
• Decision Tree Model successfully predicted avocado prices using volume, year, and type.
• The analysis remained simple, interpretable, and faithful to classroom methods.

📂 Repository Structure

.
├── avocado.R                 # Main R script
├── avocado.csv               # Dataset (ignored in .gitignore if excluded)
└── presentation/             # Presentation materials & plots
    ├── Asya_Berk_Avocado_Prices_Presentation.pdf
    ├── Avocado_Prices_Presentation.pdf
    └── plots/
        ├── plot1.png ... plot7.png

🚀 How to Run

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Asyaberk/avocado-prices-r-project.git

2. Download the dataset from Kaggle if not included.
3. Place avocado.csv in the project root.
4. Run the analysis in R:

   source("avocado.R")

🙋‍♀️ Author

👩‍💻 Asya Berk
CMPE343 – Business Intelligence and Applied Analytics
Spring 2025

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✨ This project was not just about coding — it was about telling a story with data. From exploring raw numbers to visual insights and predictive modeling, the journey showed how even something as simple as avocados can reveal fascinating economic patterns.