by Katie Paige, on February 14, 2017
Happy Valentine's Day!
But more importantly: Happy Valentine's Birthday to the Reed family!
When Chris Reed joined Arkatechture two years ago, we were excited to learn that he and his wife share the same birthday - and it happens to be Valentine's Day! Since then, we have been left wondering: How common is a Valentine's Day Birthday?
A quick Google search suggests that Valentine's Day must be one of the worst birthdays to have, but Chris assures us that's not true.
There has been a significant amount of research done on the statistics of birthdays, and this blog post by the Daily Viz does a great job describing the data, and points out that the least-common birthdays are on Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Year's Day! The 4th of July and dates around Thanksgiving also fall towards the bottom of the list. However, Valentine's Day ranks relatively high!
Naturally, we pulled this data from FiveThirtyEight's GitHub to do a bit of visual exploration in Tableau. The patterns that the Daily Viz found are easy to spot in the data. Check it out:
As you can see above, Valentine's Day is one of the few above average days for birthdays in the first half of the year! The summer months are very popular for birthdays, with September being the number one month for birthdays.
In our viz below, we found that Valentine's Day ranks above average for both February birthdays and the 14th day of the month.
What do you think? Any theories on this Valentine's Day birthday spike?
Interested in how your birthday stacks up? Check out our viz above!
