One of my friends that were interested in birds came up to me and asked about the bone

structure that birds have and that if a bird were to grow longer legs would it have to
compromise by developing a larger wingspan by extending the bones in its wings. The
question that I am going to investigate is

"What is the relationship between the length of the Humerus (mm) and the length of the
Femur (mm)”

The data was sourced from the Kaggle website https://www.kaggle.com/zhangjuefei/birds-

bones-and-living-habits

I will place the femur length in millimetres (independent) on the X-axis and the humerus
length in millimetres (dependent) on the Y-axis, as I expect the wings to get bigger to carry
the weight of the legs.

Bird bone length

450

400

350

300
Humerus (mm)

250

200

150

100

50

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
Femur (mm)

When we look at the graph we can see that the data points tend to rise as we go for the
right showing us a positive relationship. This also means as the bird's Femur length increases
in millimetres, the humorous length in millimetres tends to increase.

As the association is quite strong and concentrated in the beginning the data point seems to
become more unpredictable the further right they travel giving it an uneven scatter.

At first glance, it is easy to notice one outlier Datapoint that sits a decent way away from the
trendline in the upper right section of the graph.
 Bird bone length
450

400

350

300
Humerus (mm)

250

200 f(x)==0.594524194925846
R² 2.07844096313782 x − 11.9302690896521

150

100

50

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
Femur (mm)

I believe that it is apparent that the linear trend line is reasonable given the spread of the
data set above and below the line. The correlation coefficient is 0.77 which supports a
strong and positive association.

Features

Outliers
The data point (110.54,420) might be invalid, but given the fact that they are around 6
points halfway in between it and the general data point cluster indicate that this point
should be kept in the analysis

Groups
When developing this graph I hadn’t noticed any obvious grouping of data other than
maybe the small group in the top right, which could hold a different species responsible

The linear model for comparable length in bird bones is y = 2.0784x - 11.93
Where X is the length of the femur and Y is the length of the humerus

The gradient is 2.0784 this would suggest that for every 1mm the femur would grow the
humerus would grow around 2mm.

I have noticed a thin gap in the data at about 70mm, so I will use X=70 to calculate a
prediction for femur length
y = 2.0784 x 70 - 11.93 = 133.558\
To conclude I have found that there is a strong positive linear association between femur
length and humerus length.

I believe this to be reasonable because you could somewhat deduce on your own that to
carry more leg weight, they would need longer wings to carry it.