This week I attempted to observe patterns in the data FL_Lottery.xls, which contains the winning numbers form the Florida Lottery since 1988, a total of 1558 rounds of lottery were recorded. In order to visualize this data, I used RAW and plugged the data into the scatterplot tool. I set ‘date’ as my x-axis, so as to conveniently represent a timeline, and ‘winning numbers’ as my y-axis.
Before I had analyzed this data, I was sure that the spread of winning numbers would be more or less even within the ranges of possible numbers. What surprised me is that in fact, there is a clustering of frequency of winning numbers in the lower values. In particular, after 2004, this frequency significantly increases. In fact, after 2005, there were no winning numbers above 30.
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