The Australian Election Study is an impressive long term research project that has collected the attitudes and behaviours of a sample of individual voters after each Australian federal election since 1987. All the datasets and documentation are freely ... [Read more...]

My eye was caught by this tweet by Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times with an Alan Smith animation of the US Treasury yield curve from 2005 to 2009. It’s a nice graphic and it made me wonder what it would look like over a longer period. The ?... [Read more...]

OK, no stats today, just fidgeting about with graphics devices and type faces. Caveat - the details of graphics formats and typefaces is not my area of real expertise, this blog post is me noting down things that I found useful and others might too. As... [Read more...]

The election forecasts Building on my recent blog posts, I’ve put up a page dedicated to forecasts of the coming Australian federal election. It takes the state space model of two-party-preferred vote from my first blog on polls leading up to this e... [Read more...]

Warning - this post discusses gambling odds and even describes me placing small $5 bets, which I can easily afford to lose. In no way should this be interpreted as advice to anyone else to do the same, and I accept absolutely no liability for anyone... [Read more...]

Warning - this post discusses gambling odds and even describes me placing small $5 bets, which I can easily afford to lose. In no way should this be interpreted as advice to anyone else to do the same, and I accept absolutely no liability for anyone... [Read more...]

So now that I live in Melbourne, to blend in with the locals I need to at least vaguely follow the AFL (Australian Football League). For instance, my work like many others has an AFL footy-tipping competition. I was initially going to choose my tips ba... [Read more...]

Swings are far from uniform Last week I introduced a Bayesian state space model of two-party-preferred voting intention for Australian federal elections. It treats the surveys from various polling firms as imperfect (potentially systematically imperfe... [Read more...]

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...]