Publications by free range statistics - R
Rents in Melbourne by @ellis2013nz
Motivation So, I’m in the process of moving to Melbourne and have a personal interest in the rental market there. But I’m also more generally interested in the economics of housing. Purchase costs get most of the attention, but rental costs are generally recognised as the better indication of the real “price” of housing in supply and de...
7639 sym R (7135 sym/6 pcs) 14 img
Sri Lanka visitor arrivals by @ellis2013nz
So I’ve been holidaying in Sri Lanka for a while now, and thought I would do a brief blog post using some public tourism data. Tourism has grown rapidly in Sri Lanka since the civil war finished in 2009. Travelling around, it’s easy to see why. Sri Lanka excels in the range of attractions it has to offer visitors. These include beaches, hi...
5625 sym R (5803 sym/1 pcs) 16 img
Understanding the limitations of group-level inequality data by @ellis2013nz
A critical tweet the other day by Nicolas Sommet reminded me of the book The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better”. That book argues that: “…there are ‘pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption’. It claims that for ea...
15537 sym R (10300 sym/1 pcs) 18 img 1 tbl
Simulating simple dice games by @ellis2013nz
A necessary but not sufficient condition for a game being one of skill rather than pure chance is that the player gets to make choices. If the game play is fully automatic, as in standard Snakes and Ladders, then there cannot possibly be any skill involved. However, any game of pure chance can be converted to one of skill simply by adding a wager...
7512 sym R (2444 sym/2 pcs) 4 img
Suppressed data (left-censored counts) by @ellis2013nz
This is a post about dealing with tables that have been subject to cell suppression or perturbation for confidentiality reasons. While some of the data world is only just waking up to issues of confidentiality and privacy, national statistics offices and associated researchers over some decades have developed a whole field of knowledge and tools...
15193 sym R (10130 sym/5 pcs) 10 img 4 tbl
A more systematic look at suppressed data by @ellis2013nz
Last week I blogged about some different ways of dealing with data in a cross tab that has been suppressed as a means of disclosure control, when the count in a cell is less than six. I tried simple replacement of those cells with “3”, two different multiple imputation methods, and left-censored Poisson regression based on survival methods. I...
6390 sym R (10585 sym/1 pcs) 12 img 1 tbl
Counting digits by @ellis2013nz
Counting digits appearing in page numbers The other day in a training session, the facilitators warmed people up into intellectual work with this group exercise: Count the number of times the digit “1” appears in the page numbers of a 90 page book. Then, count the number of times it appears in the page numbers of a 2,000 page book. (Actual ...
5535 sym R (4531 sym/4 pcs) 10 img
Number of births in the twentieth century by @ellis2013nz
Motivation A couple of weeks back, Branko Milanovic asked on Twitter : “Does anyone know a link to a calculation on how many people were born … in the entire 20th century?” Somewhat surprisingly, no-one did. However, there was a calculation by the Population Research Bureau that about 108 billion people had walked the earth since 50,000 y...
6092 sym R (6472 sym/4 pcs) 14 img
Simulating Persian Monarchs gameplay by @ellis2013nz
‘I can teach you in a minute…’ In a recent post I simulated some simple dice games and promised (or threatened) that this was the first of a series of posts about games of combined luck and chance. The main aim of that post was to show how even simple probabilistic games can become complicated with tweaks to the rules, but I also mentioned ...
10224 sym R (13059 sym/5 pcs) 4 img
What the world agrees with by @ellis2013nz
A serious, decades-long attempt to understand different peoples’ values David Hood (@Thoughfulnz) has been posting some interesting snippets of analysis using the World Values Survey data (like this example). This inspired me to have a look at the data myself; something that’s been on my to-do list for years. I have analysed it before, but a ...
8093 sym R (12904 sym/4 pcs) 4 img