free range statistics

I experiment with some different ways of handling counts in tables that have been suppressed for confidentiality, and come up in favour of multiple imputation. The mice R package helpfully lets you define your own imputation algorithm.

I play around with simulating some dice games.

Cross-sectional country-level data will show a relationship between income inequality and life expectancy even if inequality itself has no direct impact on life exectancy; so long as there is changing marginal impact of individual income on individual life space (as of course there is).

Sri Lanka has a rapidly growing tourism industry, two international tourism seasons, and seasonality patterns in arrivals that vary according to country of origin.

Rents in Melbourne have on average grown fastest in suburbs that were the cheapest in 2000; at least for two and three bedroom flats and for two bedroom houses. Also, scatterplots are awesome.

Simulating complex survey data in order to fit slightly mis-specified relative risk models, we find that confidence intervals' coverage is pretty much as advertised if we use appropriate methods that adjust for the complex survey data, but under-perform if the data is treated naively as coming from a simple random sample.

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.