So I’ve been back in Australia for five months now. While things have been very busy in my new role at Nous Group, it’s not so busy that I’ve failed to notice there’s a Federal election due some time by November this year. I’m keen ... [Read more...]

There was a flurry of activity in the last couple of days on Twitter and the blogosphere, most notably Thomas Lumley’s excellent Stats Chat, relating to whether there is a pro-government bias in surveys of New Zealand voting intention in the summer. As the analysis I’ve seen used ... [Read more...]

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 d... [Read more...]

‘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 ... [Read more...]

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 calculatio... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 differen... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

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... [Read more...]

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.... [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

In this post I simulate a population and a complex survey of it. The survey has stratification, two-stage sampling and post-collection calibration to marginal population totals. The original idea was to follow up on last week’s post on relative ris... [Read more...]

This post tries to explain the difference between odds ratios and relative risk ratios; and how just a few letters in the code fitting a generalized linear model mean the difference between extracting one or the other. There are plenty of other explan... [Read more...]

A couple of months ago I blogged about consumer spending on vehicle fuel by income. The impetus for that post was the introduction on 1 July 2018 of an 11.5 cent per litre “regional fuel tax” in Auckland. One vehement critic of the levy, largely ... [Read more...]

The debate about business confidence as a possible leading indicator of economic growth reminded me of a question that has long been on my back-burner - what data make the best leading indicators (say, a quarter of a year ahead) of economic growth? Th... [Read more...]

The ANZ bank have a nice bit of publicity for themselves each month in New Zealand with the release of the results of their monthly Business Outlook Survey. This week it caused a bit of a stir, with the ANZ’s own commentary reporting New Zealand corporate sector is “in ... [Read more...]

Motivation For a variety of reasons I wanted a Linux server in the cloud with data science software on it. In no particular order: so I could access a reliable setup from anywhere with a web browser, including on networks without the software I need (which happens a lot in ... [Read more...]

Fuel tax debates So, there’s currently a vibrant debate on a small New Zealandish corner of Twitter about a petrol tax coming into effect in Auckland today, and the different impacts of such taxes on richer and poorer households. The Government has released analysis from the Stats NZ Household ... [Read more...]

Total fertility rate This is my second blog post while familiarising myself with the arithmetic of demography. In my earlier post I looked at how life expectancy is calculated. “Period life expectancy at birth” as estimated by national statistical offices is actually best thought of as a summary of death ... [Read more...]