Posts from September 2014 (43)

The Herald interactive for election results looks really impressive. The headline infographic for the latest poll, not so much. The graph is designed to display changes between two polls, for which the margin of error is 1.4 times higher than in a single poll: the margin of error for National goes beyond the edge of the graph.

The lead for the story is worse

The Kim Dotcom-inspired event in Auckland’s Town Hall that was supposed to end John Key’s career gave the National Party an immediate bounce in support this week, according to polling for the last Herald DigiPoll survey.

Since both the Dotcom and Greenwald/Snowden Moments of Truth happened in the middle of polling, they’ve split the results into before/after Tuesday.  That is, rather than showing an average of polls, or even a single poll, or even a change from a single poll, they are headlining the change between the first and second halves of a single poll!

The observed “bounce” was 1.3%. The quoted margin of error at the bottom of the story is 3.5%, from a poll of 775 people. The actual margin of error for a change between the first and second halves of the poll is about 7%.

Only in the Internet Party’s wildest dreams could this split-half comparison have told us anything reliable. It would need the statistical equivalent of the CSI magic video-zoom enhance button to work.

From the Herald

Men who are bald at age 45 are more likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer compared with those who keep their hair.

US researchers found those who lose hair at the front of their heads and have moderate hair-thinning on the crown were 40 per cent more likely to develop a fast-growing tumour in their prostate.

This was compared with men with no baldness.

That’s all true, but what casts doubt on this finding is that you get the same results if you compare to men with severe baldness. That is, the research found a higher rate of aggressive prostate cancer in men who had ‘moderate’ baldness on the top of head, but not in those who had milder or more severe forms, and no increase in non-aggressive prostate cancer. Here are the estimated relative increases in risk, with confidence intervals

When you consider the lack of a consistent trend, and the fact that the evidence isn’t all that strong for the moderate-baldness/aggressive-cancer combination, I don’t think this is worth getting all that excited about.

This one can mostly be blamed on the journal: the American Society of Clinical Oncology press release isn’t too bad in itself, but if you compare it to the other recent occasions when ASCO have issued a press release, it doesn’t really measure up.

The Herald has an interactive election-results map, which will show results for each polling place as they come in, together with demographic information about each electorate.  At the moment it’s showing the 2011 election data, and the displays are still being refined — but the Herald has started promoting it, so I figure it’s safe for me to link as well.

Mashblock is also developing an election site. At the moment they have enrolment data by age. Half the people under 35 in Auckland Central seem to be unenrolled,which is a bit scary. Presumably some of them are students enrolled at home, and some haven’t been in NZ long enough to enrol, but still.

Some non-citizens probably don’t know that they are eligible — I almost missed out last time. So, if you know someone who is a permanent resident and has lived in New Zealand for a year, you might just ask if they know about the eligibility rules. Tomorrow is the last day.

Update

Updated now to give correct teams for the game on Saturday. Thanks to ian.tinkler@xtra.co.nz for pointing out my mistake.

Team Ratings for Finals Week 2

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 196 matches played, 115 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 58.7%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Finals Week 2

Here are the predictions for Finals Week 2. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 7

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 24 matches played, 18 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 75%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 7

Here are the predictions for Round 7. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 6

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 6, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 38 matches played, 24 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.2%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 6

Here are the predictions for Round 6. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

• The US Social Security baby names database (from, tidy version) has been popular for data exploration and visualisation, but it’s not perfect. At proofreader.com, a look at the sex ratio in the database over time, and why it’s different from the 53% male you’d expect.

• From the New York Times, interactive visualisations of failure rates for different methods of contraception

• From the Brainflapping blog at the Guardian, a set of classifications for science stories (Axe Grinding, Soapbox, Wild Extrapolation). My favourite “Article has not been checked by anyone who knows how to communicate”

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday September 19 2014.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of September 13 – 19 2014 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

(more…)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

3News

Teenagers who use cannabis daily are seven times more likely to attempt suicide and 60 percent less likely to complete high school than those who don’t, latest research shows.

Me (via Science Media Center)

“The associations in the paper are summarised by estimated odds ratios comparing non-users to those who used cannabis daily. This can easily be misleading to non-specialists in two ways. Firstly, nearly all the statistical evidence comes from the roughly 1000 participants who used cannabis less than daily, not the roughly 50 daily users — the estimates for daily users are an extrapolation.

“Secondly, odds ratios are hard to interpret.  For example, the odds ratio of 0.37 for high-school graduation could easily be misinterpreted as a 0.37 times lower rate of graduation in very heavy cannabis users. In fact, if the overall graduation rate matched the New Zealand rate of 75%, the rate in very heavy cannabis users would be 53%, and the rate in those who used cannabis more than monthly but less than weekly would be 65%.

That is, the estimated rate of completing high school is not 60% lower, it’s about 20% lower.  This is before you worry  about the extrapolation from moderate to heavy users and the causality question. The 60% figure is unambiguously wrong. It isn’t even what the paper claims.  It’s an easy mistake to make, though the researchers should have done more to prevent it, and that’s why it was part of my comments last week.

You can read all the Science Media Centre commentary here.

[Update: The erroneous ‘60% less likely to complete high school’ statement is in the journal press release. That’s unprofessional at best.]

(I could also be picky and point out 3News have the journal wrong: The Lancet Psychiatry, which started this year, is not the same as The Lancet, founded in 1823)