Tag Archives: data

Beware Spurious Correlations

  Tyler Vigen manages a humorous website entitled Spurious Correlations. He mines research data from datasets, finds data with similar trends, and creates a chart graphing that data. The result is a “spurious correlation”.  The charts do not imply causation, but rather they are an entertaining visualization of statistics and data manipulation. Examples of his spurious correlations include: number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with films Nicholas Cage appeared in per capita cheese consumption correlates...

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Uncategorized , , Updated: November 4, 2015

A Follow up on Data Misrepresentation

Last posting I highlighted two books written by bad science guru Dr. Ben Goldacre. This time I am passing on another (shorter) source that came across my desk last week. Jordan Ellenberg wrote a short posting for the Wall Street Journal, How Not to Be Mislead by Data, that provides several examples of how accurate data can be presented in a way that can lead a reader into unsound conclusions. Dr. Ellenberg talks about the following data presentation errors. 1. Failure to...

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Uncategorized , , Updated: July 13, 2015