The Effect of Pollutants on Public Health

Presenter: Irving Juárez Diaz

Presenter Status: Undergraduate student

Academic Year: 22-23

Semester: Spring

Faculty Mentor: Omayra Ortega

Department: Mathematics

Funding Source/Sponsor: Class Project

President's Strategic Plan Goal: Sustainability and Environmental Inquiry

Abstract:
When presented with the Cal Enviro Screen 4.0 dataset that is used to identify disproportionate burden of pollution in different areas of California, we begin by testing the normality of distribution of the two biggest variables in the dataset being the Population Characteristics Score, which sums up the relative rate of negative health and socioeconomic factors of a particular area, and the Pollution Burden Score, that similarly is a score that reflects the sum of pollution factors. Second, attempting to identify whether pollutant factors in California have an effect on low birth weight, we look at a set of multiple linear-regression models to see if low birth weight can accurately model low birth weight and reflect the actual rates in the Cal Enviro Screen 4.0 data. Lastly, interested in the pollution of Sonoma County, we test to see if there is a significant difference between mean pollution burden score of Sonoma County and the rest of California. The Cal Enviro Screen 4.0 dataset consisting of roughly 8,000 cases, we utilize RStudio, a statistical computing software, to obtain our statistical results in order to draw our conclusions. With the dataset entered into RStudio, we observed a normal distribution in the Pollution Burden Score, but a rather uniform distribution when it came to the Population Characteristics Score. Moving on, after looking at a given subset of multiple linear-regression models of the pollutant factors, none of them accurately model low birth weight due to the extremely low Radj2 values meaning that these sources of pollution do not heavily affect low birth weight. Finally, looking at relative box-plots and running a two-sample t-test on the mean Pollution Burden Scores of Sonoma County and those outside of the county, there is a significant difference in the two and we can assume it is healthier to live in Sonoma County given that the mean Pollution Burden Scores were lower with respect to the multiple sources of pollutants listed in the dataset.