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


Covid-19 vaccination rates in the Pacific

28 May 2023

I compare vaccination rates in the Pacific to GDP per capita and find the evidence isn't strong enough to say that there is a relationship between the two.


Showing women proportion of Parliamentarians on a map

26 May 2023

I have a go at showing the proportion of members of Parliament that are women on a map of the world, as an experiment in a tricky data visualisation


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.