Exploring 12 Months of Sneezing Data
While sitting at my desk last summer I began to notice myself sneezing nearly every morning at the same time. This kept happening so often that I thought I would try to log each time I sneezed to see if there was some sort of pattern. Over the next 12 months I recorded the date and time of each sneeze.
I thought I would have some fun, collect some data and take a quick peek at it. Here’s what I found:
Overall, I sneezed 333 times in the past 12 months. That’s about 0.9 sneezes per day!
Feeling very blessed!
While I don’t notice any trends in seasonality, there are some peaks and valleys that jump out. The cumulative trendline is mostly linear and there aren’t any obvious groups of data.
Applying statistical process controls to predict illness
In addition to logging each sneeze event with the date and time, I also included a few notes. In early March and May I was quite sick with a common cold. Just before falling ill I noticed a huge increase in sneezing! I had always assumed sneezing more during a cold to be an old myth, but maybe there is credibility to it after all.
A bad case of the Mondays?
For some reason, it appears I log much more sneezes on Mondays. My guess is that the air exchanger in my office sits idle during the weekend, and when it turns on Monday morning blows some extra dust into the office area. I also notice I rarely sneeze on the weekends, which is nice because I can save on tissues!
Sleep, sneeze, eat, repeat…
Taking a look at the distribution of sneezes over the time of day I see two interesting patterns. First, most of the sneezing is concentrated in the morning and tapers off at the end of the day. Second, there are far fewer sneezes near meal times at noon and 6 PM.
Time between sneezes
The distribution for the interval between sneezes is interesting. Most sneezes happen within an hour of each other, but the longest I have gone without is about a full day. I think this is heavily influenced from the fact I often double sneezed, or even had three in a row.