Publications by Peter's stats stuff - R
nzelect 0.4.0 on CRAN with results from 2002 to 2014 and polls up to September 2017 by @ellis2013nz
More nzelect New Zealand election data on CRAN Version 0.4.0 of my nzelect R package is now on CRAN. The key changes from version 0.3.0 are: election results by voting place are now available back to 2002 (was just 2014) polling place locations, presented as consistent values of latitude and longitude, now available back to 2008 (was just 2014)...
5629 sym R (3393 sym/3 pcs) 6 img
New Zealand 2017 election results by @ellis2013nz
Election results are in The New Zealand Electoral Commission have released the final count of votes and seats from the 2017 election. Moving in the direction most sensible observers expected, the National Party lost two seats compared to the “on-the-night” provisional vote once all the special votes were in, and the final results are: Party...
4397 sym R (3939 sym/1 pcs) 2 img 1 tbl
New Zealand fatal traffic crashes by @ellis2013nz
Traffic fatalities in the news Fatalities from traffic crashes have been in the news in New Zealand recently, for tragic reasons. For once, data beyond the short term have come into the debate. Sam Warburton has written two good articles on the topic, with good consideration of the data. He has also, via Twitter, made his compilation of NZTA a...
8144 sym R (11779 sym/8 pcs) 22 img
Seasonality of plagues by @ellis2013nz
Seasonality of plague deaths In the course of my ramblings through history, I recently came across Mark R. Welford and Brian H. Bossak Validation of Inverse Seasonal Peak Mortality in Medieval Plagues, Including the Black Death, in Comparison to Modern Yersinia pestis-Variant Diseases. This article is part of an interesting epidemiological liter...
8196 sym R (7254 sym/1 pcs) 10 img
Some quirks with R and SQL Server by @ellis2013nz
I’ve been writing on this blog less frequently in the past few months. Mostly this is because I’ve been working on a very intensive and engaging professional project that is much more hands-on (ie coding) than I’ve been at work for a while. So a lot of energy has been going into that. One interesting side effect for me has been diving de...
7480 sym R (8285 sym/4 pcs)
How to recruit data analysts for the public sector by @ellis2013nz
A management challenge Between 2011 and 2017 I selected somewhere between 20 and 30 staff and contractors, for New Zealand public sector roles with titles like Analyst, Senior Analyst and Principal Analyst. Alternative names for these roles could have been (and sometimes were) “researcher”, “data analyst”, “statistician”, “R devel...
28052 sym 2 img
Average spend, activities and length of visit in the NZ International Visitor Survey by @ellis2013nz
A puzzle In my last blog post, I gave a hypothetical test exercise for candidates in a recruitment process, involving the International Visitor Survey (IVS) from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). I once managed the team responsible for that survey and other sector data, so I was familiar with it, knew the exercise made ...
11527 sym R (9752 sym/5 pcs) 14 img
Visualising an ethnicity statistical classification by @ellis2013nz
Official statistical classifications can be big, complex things. For example, the complete version of the “International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities, Rev.4” comes as either a 300 page PDF or a 1.3GB Microsoft Access database. Classifications typically have a hierarchy of four or more levels and hundreds or ...
5306 sym R (2013 sym/1 pcs)
Books I liked in 2017 by @ellis2013nz
I last blogged about books in September 2016 and it’s still in my 10 most popular posts. I thought I’d update it with some of the data-relevant books I read in 2017. Mostly these are books that were published before 2017 – it’s just that it was last year that I got around to reading them. Well, this is a “web log” (ie “blog”) a...
12036 sym 10 img
Do tweeps with more followers follow tweeps with more followers? by @ellis2013nz
Branko Milanovic asked on Twitter: Idea for a paper: “Homogamy” on Twitter. Do people with more followers follow people with more followers? I don’t have time to write a paper but I was sufficiently interested to want to blog about it. The consensus in the replies was “of course they do”, with the claim that Twitter is well known fo...
12418 sym R (11853 sym/7 pcs) 12 img