Articles by Francis Smart

Data Fun – Inspired by Darasaurus

March 22, 2019 | Francis Smart

After my recent post on Anscombe's Quartet in which I demonstrated how to efficiently adjust any data set to match mean, variance, correlation (x,y), as well as regression coefficients. Philip Waggoner tuned me onto Justin Matejka and George Fitzmauric... [Read more...]

The importance of Graphing Your Data – Anscombe’s Clever Quartet!

March 19, 2019 | Francis Smart

Francis Anscombe's seminal paper on "Graphs in Statistical" analysis (American Statistician, 1973) effectively makes the case that looking at summary statistics of data is insufficient to identify the relationship between variables. He demonstrates this by generating four different data sets (Anscombe's quartet) which have nearly identical summary statistics. His data have ...
[Read more...]

Strategizing Retirement Investments (In the US)

September 26, 2018 | Francis Smart

Major caveat! I have no investment training or finance training and all of my calculations are back of the envelope calculations put together from what information I can gather online. In addition, given that investment planning usually spans decades, massive uncertainties exist in tax schemes and expected rate of returns. ...
[Read more...]

Efficiently Saving and Sharing Data in R

December 1, 2016 | Francis Smart

After spending a day the other week struggling to make sense of a federal data set shared in an archaic format (ASCII fixed format dat file). It is essential for the effective distribution and sharing of data that it use the minimum amount of disk space and be rapidly accessible ...
[Read more...]

Calculating Average Consumption From One Week of Purchases

April 14, 2016 | Francis Smart

A number of large surveys have attempted to quantify consumer consumption from a limited period of time observed. This task can be fairly complex as it is fraught with potentially large difficulties directly observing who is consuming what. Rather than this expensive method some researchers have attempted to substitute more ...
[Read more...]

Calculating Average Consumption From One Week of Purchases

April 14, 2016 | Francis Smart

A number of large surveys have attempted to quantify consumer consumption from a limited period of time observed. This task can be fairly complex as it is fraught with potentially large difficulties directly observing who is consuming what. Rather than this expensive method some researchers have attempted to substitute more ...
[Read more...]

FALSE: Clinton Funded by "Grassroots"

March 1, 2016 | Francis Smart

The blatant distortions of reality put forth by the Clinton campaign are so offensive as to be laughable at times. In the victory speech of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina she spent a significant portion of it talking about how her campaign is financed by "grassroots".Well, looking at the ...
[Read more...]

Big Business Backs Hillary: Small Bernie

February 19, 2016 | Francis Smart

Big business, lawyers, and the financial sector are the largest campaign backers of Hillary Clinton. Collectively they represent 35.5 million dollars donated to her campaign, 38% of total itemized funds donated to the Clinton campaign in 2015. Bernie Sanders on the other hand is largely backed by a diverse collection of individuals: engineers, ...
[Read more...]

The Simple Reason Sanders Is Winning

February 13, 2016 | Francis Smart

Sanders has way more backers across the United States (with the possible exception of the South). Hillary Clinton might be doing well at the polls. However, the shocking fact of polling is that only 8-9% of those asked to participate in polls combined ...
[Read more...]

Analysis: Clinton backed by Big Money: Sanders by Small

February 10, 2016 | Francis Smart

This article examines FEC data in depth and finds what most people already know. Hillary Clinton's presidential bid is financed largely through a relatively small quantity of big donors while Bernie Sanders' presidential bid is funded by numerous small donors.In order to do our analysis, we look at four ...
[Read more...]
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