Population Distribution Visualization

Downloads World Bank population data (Prodigy-InfoTech Task 1 dataset) and produces two visualizations: a histogram of country population sizes and a bar chart of total population by region.

Project Structure

.
├── requirements.txt
├── visualize_population.py
├── data/               # downloaded CSVs (created at runtime)
└── output/             # generated charts (created at runtime)

Setup

pip install -r requirements.txt
python visualize_population.py

This downloads population.csv and metadata_country.csv into data/, then saves population_histogram.png and population_by_region.png into output/.

Tools & Libraries Used

• Python 3 — core language
• pandas — reading CSVs, merging population data with country metadata, filtering, grouping, and aggregating by region
• matplotlib — building the histogram and horizontal bar chart, custom axis formatting, and saving figures to disk
• pathlib — cross-platform path handling for data/output directories
• urllib.request — downloading source CSVs directly from GitHub (no external HTTP library needed)

Skills Practiced

• Data acquisition: fetching remote CSV files and caching them locally so the script doesn't re-download on every run
• Data cleaning: coercing string columns to numeric with pd.to_numeric(..., errors="coerce"), dropping rows with missing values
• Data merging: joining the population table with country metadata on Country Code to attach region/income group info
• Filtering aggregates: excluding World Bank aggregate rows (e.g. "World", "High income") by requiring a non-empty Region
• Data aggregation: groupby + sum to compute total population per region
• Data visualization:
  • Histogram for a continuous distribution (country population sizes)
  • Horizontal bar chart for a categorical comparison (population by region), including value labels on each bar
  • Custom tick formatting (e.g. displaying axis values as 120M / 450K)
• Code organization: separating concerns into download_data, load_population, plot_population_histogram, plot_population_by_region, and main functions
• Reproducibility: pinning minimum library versions in requirements.txt

Dataset Source

World Bank population data via the Prodigy-InfoTech data-science-datasets repository (Task 1).