Think back…how often in debate – on the radio, on TV – have you heard people state that “x is linked to y”?. ‘y’, for example, could be cancer or the economic slump and ‘x’ anything from pollution levels to bacon consumption, low confidence to the weather.  In saying that the two are linked, they are really only referring to an association, a statistical pattern, between them. But the implication, sometimes implicit,

There seems to be no end to the potential for Statistics to harvest the internet – blogs, tweets, e-mails – to find patterns in our innermost thoughts and emotions and to understand what makes us tick as humans. Think back to the Joy of Stats and the vast ‘madness movement’ map which analysed our digital traces and unwrapped what ‘mankind’ is feeling at any given time. What might be an everyday way of using

We’re not all statisticians but we are all, to some extent, programmed to reason statistically. In a bid to make sense of the world around us, we compare, contrast, look for patterns and are drawn to a statistical technique called correlation, a way of measuring the extent to which a change in one measurable thing – a ‘variable’ – is associated with the change in another measurable thing. Indeed, you can calculate the

Statisticians may sometimes seem over-meticulous and detail-obsessed, but if anyone can see the wood for the trees, it’s them. By checking through detail, they are really just bringing everything together so that they can look at the big picture. At the weekend, in an interview on Radio 4 the ONS’s chief economist Joe Grice said that the ‘did it/didn’t it?’ debate around the UK and double dip recessions was “counter productive” and that we’d all

This morning’s Radio 4 Today programme included an interview with Nate Silver, the statistician and analyst renowned for predicting the most recent US election results via models based on electoral history, demographics and polling. He correctly called all 50 states in the US Presidential election. His stock is now very high and he is viewed by many as the go-to predictor in the political arena. But he is determined not to be misunderstood or considered infallible. Indeed, he very humbly forecast

We’ve been here before, but that doesn’t make the pain of statistical abuse any lighter. A government, down in the polling dumps, gets anxious to extol its policies. It seizes eagerly on any sign they are working. Temptation looms, in the shape of exaggerating or, as some would say, actively misinterpreting data. The Department of Work and Pensions is in the firing line over statements made about the flow of claimants

Last year there was a surge of measles in England and Wales and already this year health authorities in South Wales and the north east of England are reporting spikes in cases of a disease that had been on its way out – thanks to the success of the MMR vaccine says NHS Choices. A causal link can’t definitively be made with the Wakefield case in 1998 and the way, then and since

Doctors have to have a minimum understanding of basic statistics and if they don’t they put patients and professional integrity at risk. That surely is a lesson from the report of the Mid-Staffs inquiry and now the enforced closure of a children’s heart unit at Leeds. Doctors will complain their training curriculum is already crowded – they don’t just have to conquer medicine but acquire personal, business and (if they are to

‘What the budget numbers tell us, and what they don’t’ an RSS-getstats parliamentary panel event took place on 19 March. Read on for a brief account of discussion. Budgets are ‘political’ and interpretation of the numbers they present will always be ‘pluralist’, the RSS getstats panel audience was told - the event taking place a day before Chancellor George Osborne did his best to prove the point. But recognising political reality did not exonerate government,

The Guardian reports Facebook users are ‘unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs’. What a writer  calls ‘algorithmic detective work’  — the use of common Big Data techniques – could allow Facebook and similar operations to work out that if you like certain films or express certain views you are more likely to have this or that sexual orientation or religious beliefs. The culprit, it turns