Publications by free range statistics - R
Finding a circle in a chart by @ellis2013nz
So this tweet came across my feed. To save you going there it is about a selection exercise for a job for (I think) an IT start up, described proudly by its author as “insanely hard”; and the job is to find the radius of the brown circle in this diagram: At first it just annoyed me, and my reaction was a) I’d never want to work for this guy ...
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Model life tables by @ellis2013nz
I am working to improve my knowledge of demography. This is something I’ve only had a relatively superficial engagement with but it’s an important part of the responsibilities of the team where I work. A key tool in demography is a “life table”, which is basically a table where rows are ages or age groups and columns are different calculat...
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Log transforms, geometric means and estimating population totals by @ellis2013nz
Motivation I usually talk about statistical inference as having one of three purposes: estimating some finite and defined population parameter, like the mean income of mechanical apprentices in 1890s London or the number of 5-9 year olds living in Melbourne. Typically the results could in principle be measured directly by a census and the statisti...
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Weighted versus unweighted percentiles by @ellis2013nz
This interesting paper came out recently: A test of the predictive validity of relative versus absolute income for self-reported health and well-being in the United States, by David Brady, Michaela Curran and Richard Carpiano. It uses a large sample of longitudinal data to exploit between-individual and within-individual (across time) variation in ...
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Simpler drawing of Pacific choropleth maps by @ellis2013nz
Simple use of the draw_pac_map() function Last year I blogged about making a choropleth map of the Pacific, dealing with a few technical details like getting the map centred on the Pacific, using exclusive economic zones (EEZs) to colour things in for good visibility, adding the international dateline, etc. Soon after that blog post I abstracted th...
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Simulating confounders, colliders and mediators by @ellis2013nz
Motivation and key points So this tweet came across my feed. It refers to this article, Statistical Control Requires Causal Justification by Wysocki, Lawson and Rhemtulla, published in June last year (2022) in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. I was struck by the clarity of Figure 4 from that paper. It is such a great too...
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Covid-19 vaccination rates in the Pacific by @ellis2013nz
During the Covid-19 global health crisis, the organisation where I work – the Pacific Community, or SPC – compiled and published weekly updates on Covid-19 incidence, mortality and vaccination rates. This only recently stopped with the WHO determining in May that the global health emergency was ended, after more than three years. We published w...
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Showing women proportion of Parliamentarians on a map by @ellis2013nz
In a workshop session on data visualization earlier this week, Christophe Bontemps of the Statistical Institute for Asia and Pacific (SIAP) used as an example a range of infographics attempting to show, on a map of Asia and the Pacific, the proportion of members of Parliament that are women. The point of the exercise was to illustrate the challenge...
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Transformations for compositional data by @ellis2013nz
Motivation In engaging with this Twitter thread four months ago, I discovered that there was a whole set of statistical methods that I knew nothing about – transforming data that is in the form of a simplex. Common examples of this sort of data would include soil composition (which the Twitter thread was about), chemical composition, time use com...
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Pacific island population pyramids by @ellis2013nz
New job! I started an exciting new job just over a month ago. I am the Director of the Statistics for Development Division at the Pacific Community, which is commonly known by its now-old acronym the SPC (this used to stand for the South Pacific Commission, then the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and is now an orphan or pseudo-acronym wit...
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