March 8, 2017

Briefly

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  • “Exploding boxplots”: although a boxplot is a lot better than just showing a mean, it’s usually worse than showing the data
  • The US state of Michigan used an automated system to detect unemployment benefit fraud. Late last year, an audit of 22427 cases of fraud overturned 93% of them! Now, a class-action lawsuit has been filed (PDF), giving (a one-sided view of) more of the details.
  • StatsChat has been saying for quite some time that people shouldn’t be making generalisations about road crash rates without evaluating the statistical evidence for increases or decreases.  It’s good to see someone doing the analysis: the Ministry of Transport has a big long report (PDF, from here) including (p37)[updated link]

    110. However, since 2013 the fatality rate has injury rate has begun to increase. We conducted statistical tests (Poisson) to see whether this increase was more than natural variation, and found strong evidence that the fatality and injury rates are actually rising.

  • Fascinating blog by John Grimwade, an infographics (as opposed to data visualisation) expert (via Kieran Healy)
  • “Not only does Google, the world’s preeminent index of information, tell its users that caramelizing onions takes “about 5 minutes”—it pulls that information from an article whose entire point was to tell people exactly the opposite.”  Another problem with Google’s new answer box, less serious than the claims about a communist coup in the US, but likely to be believed by more people.
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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 »