Publications by free range statistics - R
Sampling without replacement with unequal probabilities by @ellis2013nz
Not proportional to w A week ago I was surprised to read on Thomas Lumley’s Biased and Inefficient blog that when using R’s sample() function without replacement and with unequal probabilities of individual units being sampled: “What R currently has is sequential sampling: if you give it a set of priorities w it will sample an element with p...
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Ratios of indexed line charts by @ellis2013nz
A few months Michael Read of the Australian Financial Review published a chart showing real household income in Australia plummetting, relative to the OECD, since late 2021. A version of this drifted across my social media feed and interested me. First I wanted to re-create the chart, which was straightforward enough as it was using data published ...
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Polar-centred maps by @ellis2013nz
I stumbled across this page by Brilliant Maps showing settlements with no larger settlement to their north. The author noted that Helsinki was omitted by error. I wanted to address that error, and as a resident of the southern half of the globe myself, to produce a similar map with relation to the south pole. First there’s a matter of sourcing da...
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Perturbing a non-symmetrical probability distribution by @ellis2013nz
So I will fess up, I was one of the 34% of people who chose the first, incorrect answer on this quiz on Mastodon: Original Toot, and explanatory responses, is available here. My reasoning – and my only excuse is I didn’t think it through much – was simplistic. I imagined a distribution that had the same mean and median, and in my head all th...
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Snakes and ladders by @ellis2013nz
More than five years ago I started a series of posts on games of chance and for one reason or another never got around to finishing them. Partially redressing that, here is a long-lost and now tidied up post on Snakes and Ladders. Read it before you next gaze across the smoke filled casino table at your opponent, a sinister operative of SMERSH, and...
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Population age changes in the Pacific by @ellis2013nz
The UN has released the 2024 Revision of World Population Prospects and I wanted to see the latest estimates of how Pacific Island Country and Territories (PICTs) populations will age in coming years. Aging populations After quite a bit of experimentation and iteration through different variants, I came up with this chart of the proportion of elder...
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Reproducing and adapting the UN Population Projections by @ellis2013nz
I set out to see if it was possible to reproduce the UN’s 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects for a given country by cohort component projection from the fertility, mortality and immigration rates and population starting point published as part of their projection. The motivation is to make small changes to some of those parameters – fo...
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Reproducing and adapting the UN Population Projections by @ellis2013nz
I set out to see if it was possible to reproduce the UN’s 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects for a given country by cohort component projection from the fertility, mortality and immigration rates and population starting point published as part of their projection. The motivation is to make small changes to some of those parameters – fo...
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The ‘V20’ group of vulnerable countries and the MVI by @ellis2013nz
Just a brief blog post that is basically an addendum to the one I wrote a few weeks ago on the United Nations Multidimensional Vulnerability Index. I found myself wondering about the Vulnerable Twenty (V20) Group of Ministers of Finance of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which is now (despite the ‘20’ in its name) a collection of 68 economies. Ho...
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The UN’s proposed Multidimensional Vulnerability Index by @ellis2013nz
The United Nations President of the General Assembly’s High-Level Panel on the development of a Multidimensional Vulnerability Index have (September 2023) released an Advanced Unedited Version of their Final Report, and along with it the scores on that index for 142 countries. This is relevant for my work; it’s pretty complex; and I wanted to u...
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