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.
I have a go at an 'insanely hard' (actually not that hard) problem to find the radius of a circle from someone's recruitment exercise
I make an animation and a basic Shiny app to explore the United Nations' model life tables used for demographic estimates in countries where direct estimation of mortality rates by age isn't possible.
A model that is 'improved' (in terms of making standard assumptions more plausible) by using a logarithm transform of the response will not necessarily be improved for estimating population totals.
When working with complex survey data where the weights are related to a continuous variable of interest, using a weighted rather than unweighted percentile rank will lead to different results towards the middle of the distribution; but the two measures will be highly correlated with eachother. Also, R reportedly calculates weighted percentile ranks much much faster than Stata.
I demonstrate the function I use to make it simpler to draw choropleth maps based on Pacific Island countries' and territories' exclusive economic zones.
I do some simulations to reproduce a great figure by Wysocki et al; and show different data where the causal relationship between x and y is in the presence of a third variable that is either a confounder, collider or mediator.
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.
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
I look into the use of Isometric Centralised Box-Cox Transformed Ratio for analysing compositional data like proportions of soil, time use or chemicals.
Drawing an annotated choropleth map of Pacific Island countries and territories.