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...]

Updates I’ve made small updates to two of my R packages on CRAN: ggseas (seasonal adjustment on the fly for ggplot2 graphics) and Tcomp (tourism forecasting competition data). Neither of the packages changes in a noticeable way for most users. The ggseas update is to get it ready for ... [Read more...]

Life expectancy and death rates A chance comment on Twitter about historical increases in life expectancy (in the USA) with fairly constant death rates got me wondering about the exact calculations of these things so I did some Googling. Warning on what follows - I am strictly an amateur in ... [Read more...]

At a glance: I had a brief look around New Zealand government agency websites and found 15 high quality web apps written in the Shiny platform. 13 May 2018 Here’s fifteen nice web applications built with RStudio’s Shiny framework. All of these are owned and maintained by New Zealand government departments ... [Read more...]

Surveys everywhere! Surveys are everywhere, and thinking about them in different ways has dominated my work so far this year. What’s right and wrong with them, how to improve them, do we need them, can we replace this one or that one with administrative data, why do the media (... [Read more...]

Surveys everywhere! Surveys are everywhere, and thinking about them in different ways has dominated my work so far this year. What’s right and wrong with them, how to improve them, do we need them, can we replace this one or that one with administrative data, why do the media (... [Read more...]

A conundrum for Microsoft Power BI I’ve been familiarising myself with Microsoft Power BI, which features prominently in any current discussion on data analysis and dissemination tools for organisations. It’s a good tool with some nice features. I won’t try to do a full review here, but ... [Read more...]

A conundrum for Microsoft Power BI I’ve been familiarising myself with Microsoft Power BI, which features prominently in any current discussion on data analysis and dissemination tools for organisations. It’s a good tool with some nice features. I won’t try to do a full review here, but ... [Read more...]

Caution - this blog post discusses homicide and suicide statistics and could be upsetting. If you feel disturbed or unhappy then here is a list of ways to get some emergency counselling help around the world. A grim research question In my last post... [Read more...]

Caution - this blog post discusses homicide and suicide statistics and could be upsetting. If you feel disturbed or unhappy then here is a list of ways to get some emergency counselling help around the world. A grim research question In my last post I looked at fitting a Poisson ... [Read more...]

Data that’s been only partially observed I’ve been updating my skills in fitting models to truncated data and was pleased to find that, like so much else in statistics, it’s easier than it used to be. First, some definitions: censored data ... [Read more...]

Data that’s been only partially observed I’ve been updating my skills in fitting models to truncated data and was pleased to find that, like so much else in statistics, it’s easier than it used to be. First, some definitions: censored data is where some observations are cut ... [Read more...]

Branko Milanovic asked on Twitter: Idea for a paper: “Homogamy” on Twitter. Do people with more followers follow people with more followers? I don’t have time to write a paper but I was sufficiently interested to want to blog about it. Th... [Read more...]