free range statistics

I write about applications of data and analytical techniques like statistical modelling and simulation to real-world situations. I show how to access and use data, and provide examples of analytical products and the code that produced them.

Recent posts


Transformations for compositional data

25 February 2023

I look into the use of Isometric Centralised Box-Cox Transformed Ratio for analysing compositional data like proportions of soil, time use or chemicals.


Pacific island choropleth map

13 October 2022

Drawing an annotated choropleth map of Pacific Island countries and territories.


Pacific island population pyramids

14 August 2022

I show how to access data from the Pacific Data Hub to draw population pyramids of Pacific Island countries and territories.


Smoothing charts of Supreme Court Justice nomination results

26 March 2022

Sometimes a Twitter storm of chart-shaming is unfair, mean, and frankly misguided. I reproduce and defend a chart originally produced by FiveThirtyEight to illustrate changes over time in how nominations for US Supreme Court Justices have been voted on in the Senate.


Principal components and penguins

14 June 2021

Beware that the direction of a principal component can vary depending on the sequence of the original data.


Making a database of security prices and volumes

14 February 2021

I make a SQLite database of daily observations of Australian security prices, volumes and short positions.


Visualising stock prices and volume

05 February 2021

After some experimenting with how to show stock price and volume at the same time, I conclude unsuprisingly that the charts commonly used in finance are pretty much fit for purpose, but alternative presentations have their place too.


Shiny in production for commercial clients

21 December 2020

Shiny can be an effective platform to quickly build data-intensive web applications that otherwise would not be commercially viable. The rationale for using Shiny at the right time is convenience, cost, and statistical and graphics power.


Animated map of World War I UK ship positions

05 December 2020

An animated map of UK Royal Navy ship locations during World War I.


Reproduce analysis of a political attitudes experiment

14 November 2020

I reproduce the analysis of data from a recently published experiment on the impact on Australians' and New Zealanders' attitudes to overseas aid of being exposed to writing about Chinese aid in the Pacific. Along the way I muse about the Table 2 fallacy, and try to avoid it while still using multiple imputation, bootstrap and adjusting for covariates to slightly improve the original analysis.