Coming up to the election, there's no shortage of misleading statistics, charts and downright quantitative lies being flung around. One even made it through our letterbox today. It's far from the worst available online, but such statistical slights always feel more personal when they get physically pushed into one's abode. Here goes the Liberal Democrats, being honest enough to admit that their … Continue reading Lib Dem leaflet chart fail
Author: Adam
Extracting SPSS variable labels and factors with Alteryx
SPSS is a nice statistics/analytics package that, since 1968 (!), seems to have been well-regarded program for classic statistics. It now has many new bits and pieces that target the predictive modelling market too. In my experience it was previously mostly used in academia, especially the social sciences, but these days it seems it has made inroads into business and government data too.But it's … Continue reading Extracting SPSS variable labels and factors with Alteryx
Data dictionary functionality in Tableau Server 9
Whilst Tableau is by far the best dataviz/exploration tool I have ever had the pleasure of using, I've traditionally felt it's not so strong in the boring "enterprise" areas around governance, metadata management, documentation and so on. It's quite clear to me why - the tool is/was aimed at data practitioners wanting to bypass all that slow, boring traditional IT … Continue reading Data dictionary functionality in Tableau Server 9
“Move datasource” arrives in Tableau Server v9
Oh happy days - just noticed the new Tableau Server / Online version 9 now allows one to move a datasource! Previously it was very easy to move a workbook from one project to another, but that wasn't possible for a datasource. Instead one had to delete the original datasource and republish it seperately to a … Continue reading “Move datasource” arrives in Tableau Server v9
Every death in the Game of Thrones – a visualisation
The Washington Post published a nice visualisation concerning the many, many deaths in Game of Thrones yesterday - apparently there have been 456 such violent extravaganzas. Coded by season, allegiance, importance of character, method of death and other such metadata it gives a nice refresh of the important parts of the storyline. Find out which location was deadliest, which … Continue reading Every death in the Game of Thrones – a visualisation
Free data: Constituency Explorer – UK demographics, politics, behaviour
From some combination of the Office of National Statistics, the House of Commons and Durham library comes Constituency Explorer. Billing itself as "reliable evidence for politicians and journalists - data for everyone", it allows interactive visualisation of many interesting demographics/behavioural/political attributes by UK political constituency. It's easy to view distributions and compare between a specific contstituency, the region … Continue reading Free data: Constituency Explorer – UK demographics, politics, behaviour
Behind the scenes of the FiveThirtyEight UK general election forecasting model
Here in the UK we're about to go to the polls to elect some sort of government in just a few weeks. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight team are naturally on the case in providing their famously accurate election forecasts. They were kind enough to explain again the methodology being used in this blog post by Ben Lauderdale. Go … Continue reading Behind the scenes of the FiveThirtyEight UK general election forecasting model
The most toxic place on Reddit
Reddit, the "front page of the internet" - and a network I hardly ever dare enter for fear of being sucked in to reading 100s of comments for hours on highly pointless yet entertaining things - has had its share of controversies over the years. The site is structurally divided up into "subreddits" , which … Continue reading The most toxic place on Reddit
Free data: data.gov.uk – thousands of datasets from the UK government
Data.gov.uk is the official portal that releases what the UK government deems of as open data. The government is opening up its data for other people to re-use. This is only about non-personal, non-sensitive data – information like the list of schools, crime rates or the performance of your council. At the time of writing it … Continue reading Free data: data.gov.uk – thousands of datasets from the UK government
Gephi basics: simple network graph analysis from spreadsheet data
Several interesting phenomena can be modelled and analysed using graph theory. Graph theory, which Wikipedia tells me first had a paper published about it in 1736 (!) can at its most basic perhaps be thought of as mathematical techniques to analyse problems where one can represent the protagonists as a set of objects (nodes) and lines connecting … Continue reading Gephi basics: simple network graph analysis from spreadsheet data
Dabbling with Data 