American Red Cross Fire Analysis


The Interprofessional project courses at Illinois Institute of Technology allow students of different majors to work on projects together. One of the IPRO courses I took allowed me and five other studetns to partner with the American Red Cross (AMR) and perform data analysis on their fire data. At the start of the project, AMR gave us their fire incident data and we were tasked with coming up with what to do with the data. In order to get more familiar with the data, we created maps and other visualtions of the data on the city. This helped us get a better idea of some of the factors that may affect fire incidents and the different areas that needed the most help. Once we felt that we had a good idea of what the data was telling us, we decided to take two different approaches. The first was to start a public outreach program for some of the communities with higher risk. We were able to contact some block clubs and organizations in Englewood, a high risk area, and connect them with AMR. Currently AMR focuses more reactivly, and now connecting AMR with these organizations so that AMR can provide services and programs to help prevent fires will be more proactive. The other approach we took was to use different models on the data to try to predict how may fires will occur in a given community. These models mainly helped us with variable selection and which factors affect fires the most. The other use of the models is to apply them to other cities where AMR does not have fire incident data yet, so that they have an idea of which communities will need the most help. The tools that we used for this project included QGIS for the map visualizations, R for the data analysis, and powerpoint for our midterm presentation to the mayor of Chicago and Illinois senator and final presenttion to AMR. The code for this project can be found on my GitHub page.