In a previous post, I argued that the y-axis can be misleading under certain conditions. One of these conditions is when using a bar graph with a non-zero starting point. In this post I will show that bar graphs can be misleading even when the y-axis is not misleading. In brief, bar graphs do not […]
Category: blog
Visualizing climate change with stripes
Climate change is abstract. We do not personally experience climate change in our day-to-day activities (although cimate change is detectable from any single day of weather at global scale, cf. Sippel 2020), and if we are to understand climate change, data – and in particular data visualisation – is crucial. I have recently been reading […]
Potpourri: Statistics #75
905. Introducing pewmethods: An R package for working with survey data 906. Exploring survey data with the pewmethods R package 907. Weighting survey data with the pewmethods R package 908. Analyzing international survey data with the pewmethods R package 909. autumn: Fast, Modern, and Tidy Raking 910. Data science for economists 911. Papers about Causal […]
Noise
The world is full of noise. This is not a novel insight. Luckily, the power of statistical models to predict human behaviour is limited, and if a model is able to predict all relevant variation in an outcome of interest, we should be concerned about overfitting and other potential problems. There are good reasons why […]
Which party do you think is most likely to agree?
In a new poll, JL Partners surveyed more than 2,000 respondents to understand how the public perceives the Labour Party and the Conservative Party on a series of different “woke” topics. The Daily Mail uses the poll to conclude that “Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion”. Is that what […]