Publications by Cory Lesmeister

Simpson’s Paradox

“Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.”A.E. Housman (commonly attributed to Andrew Lang)Recently at work I stumbled into a classic example of Simpson’s Paradox (Yule-Simpson Effect). Many people are not familiar with this phenomena, so I thought I would provide a brief example to help shed som...

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Battle Maps Using R and Leaflet

“Here are those damned black hat fellows again.”Attributed to men of the 26th North Carolina, Pettigrew’s Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg in describing the “Iron Brigade”.A while back I created a post about plotting Russian airstrikes in Syria using the ggmap package. Of note was the commentary and method of taking that data and bui...

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Iraq-Wikileaks Analysis with R

In a place of extreme violence and devoid of order, the practical subsumes the principle. I drifted down the path of bribery and corruption endemic to the streets of Baghdad”.Jason Whiteley, Father of Money: Buying Peace in BaghdadAs I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to explore the Wikileaks data of the US Military’s reported Signifi...

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