April 13, 2014
Housing affordability map
Saeid Adli and Alex Raichev have made interactive maps of Auckland and Wellington that try to combine the cost of housing (rent) and commuting, and present it as a fraction of income. You can select income, house size, mode of transport, how often you commute, etc.
They also provide an explanation of how they do the calculations, and all the code and data.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Nice to see the link to code and data, which is rare for these types of things.
Can’t say I would be able to easily take what they did to modify and apply to a different mix of data, but it would be better than starting from scratch.
11 years ago
Yes, there needs to be more of that. I’ve been very encouraged by the Herald’s recent habit of providing data links for their interactive graphics (thanks to @kamal_hothi).
There are three quite different advantages
1. If you want to do something similar, you can use their code and data. In this case the custom data pulls from StatsNZ are the most valuable component.
2. If you want to understand exactly what they did, you can read the code. That made a big difference to me with Peter Green’s election poll averaging.
3. Even if you don’t ever use the code or data, the fact that it’s there suggests they care about reproducibility, transparency, and peer review, which is a very good sign.
11 years ago