free range statistics

Explanation and demonstration with simulated data of the difference between relative risk ratios and odds ratios, and how to extract them from a generalized linear model.

I look into whether the regional fuel tax in Auckland has led to changes in fuel prices in other regions of New Zealand.

A demo of a favourite combination of multiple imputation, bootstrap and elastic net regularization. I look at what are good leading indicators, with reliable data available, of New Zealand's economic growth. The results turn out to be last quarter's economic growth; food prices; visitor arrivals; car registrations; business confidence; and electronic card transactions.

I have a brief look at the relationship between reported business confidence in New Zealand and what actually happens down the track with economic growth. Confidence can help (a bit) explain future growth; but current and past growth isn't helpful in explaining confidence.

A few months back, I set up a server on Amazon Web Services with a data sciencey toolkit on it. Amongst other things, this means I can collect data around the clock when necessary, as well as host my little RRobot twitter bot, without having a physical machine humming in my living room. There are lots of fiddly things to sort out to make such a setup actually fit for purpose.

I explore the relationship between household income and expenditure on gasoline and motor oil in the USA Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey.

Simulating a population with changing total fertility rate, life expectancy, infant mortality, and other parameters

Minor updates available on CRAN for the ggseas (seasonal adjustment on the fly) and Tcomp (tourism forecasting competition data) R packages

Life expectancy is calculated directly from death rates. And mathematically speaking, changes in infant mortality have a much greater impact on life expectancy than do changes in death rates in any other year.

I had a brief look around New Zealand government agency websites and found 15 high quality web apps written in the Shiny platform.