Sad about Twitter pile-ons So this is a blog post about smoothing data that has been generated over time, and a bit about Twitter being mean. To cut to the chase, here’s my own version of the data in question. This is the Senate vote for nominations ... [Read more...]

A short post today to get me back in the swing of it, after a four month break - my longest since starting the blog. But a short post with a warning - this is something that nearly caught me out and has potentially catastrophic but silent (ie unnoticed... [Read more...]

Motivation So, there’s been a recent flurry of attention to the stock market. It prompted last week’s post. But it also reminded me to bubble up to higher in my priority list a project to create a database of daily security prices and short positions... [Read more...]

Like many people around the world I have been watching the rise and fall of share prices in the US retail chain GameStop with interest. There is plenty of narrative and interpretation of what happened around and time will provide many details that are ... [Read more...]

One of the more interesting projects I worked on in 2019 could be loosely described as building a Shiny app for the Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT). But this wasn’t just any Shiny app. It was the front end for a big analytical data buil... [Read more...]

The other day while looking for something else altogether, I stumbled across naval-history.net, a website aiming to preserve historical naval documents and make them more available. I’m not sure if it’s still being actively worked on; the creator and k... [Read more...]

Terence Wood, Chris Hoy and Jonathan Pryke recently published this paper on The Effect of Geostrategic Competition on Public Attitudes to Aid. I was interested a) because of my past professional engagement with public attitudes to aid (my very first re... [Read more...]

You should all go watch Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) Earlier this year I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) and wow, I cannot recommend this movie enough. Not only is it by far the best Hamlet I have ever seen (on stage or screen), it has a fair claim... [Read more...]

The Covid-19 Symptom Data Challenge (under way at the time of writing this blog post) makes available two large sets of survey data. These are provided in granular but aggregate form ie no response-level microdata, at least for this Challenge. The two ... [Read more...]

This is a quick post looking at using biterm topic modelling, a new technique for me, on the free text responses to a survey question. I’m interested in whether this type of topic modelling might be a shortcut to analysing free text, quicker than havin... [Read more...]

Caution / who should read this - although this blog post uses some data on reporting times for Covid-19 deaths in Florida, it’s not really about that issue at all. It’s a quick dip into how to model data that comes from a mixture of two or more different ... [Read more...]

For a few weeks now I’ve been publishing estimates of the time-varying effective reproduction number for Covid-19 in Victoria (and as bonuses, NSW and Australia as a whole). Reproduction number is the average number of people each infected person infec... [Read more...]

A couple of months ago my Twitter feed featured several mass-participation stern critiques laced with sneering and mockery (aka “Twitter pile-ons”) for some naive regression modelling in the form of lines of best fit through scatter plots. All of t... [Read more...]

So an article/website is doing the rounds describing some country-level observational analysis of the relationship between hydroxychloroquine usage in the early stages of Covid-19 and deaths from that disease per million population. It purports to show... [Read more...]

Visualising growth in occupations in one industry A chart is doing the rounds purporting to show the number of administrators working in health care in the USA has grown much faster than the number of physicians - more than 3,000% growth from 1970 to ... [Read more...]

This great preprint recently came out from a team of Katelyn Gostic and others. It uses simulations to test various methods of estimating the effective reproduction number . If you are following the Covid-19 pandemic from a data angle at all, you will no doubt have come across the effective reproduction ... [Read more...]

New New Zealand election forecasts I have finalised the first proper release version of my forecast for the New Zealand general election to be held on 19 September 2020. Here are the predicted probability distributions for number of seats for several ... [Read more...]

A pleasant diversion An unexpectedly pleasant diversion from the news during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the contemplation of a considerable range of data visualisations, from the truly excellent to the amusingly bad. After all, at the excellent en... [Read more...]

Amidst controversy in several (perhaps many?) countries about the timing and pace of opening up from COVID-19 control measures, one small corner of the argument today related to why Texas is seeing record numbers of new cases of COVID-19 in the days after a range of opening up measures. In ... [Read more...]

Test positivity rates and disease incidence OK, lets talk about test positivity rates ie the proportion of administered tests that conclude the subject has the disease being tested for. These are in the news, with COVID-19 test positivity being used as an informal indicator of COVID-19 incidence and the quality ... [Read more...]