Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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Stats Training Materials – Basic Statistical Concepts

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A sound grasp of basic statistical concepts is essential to have any hope of acquiring the mindset of a statistical thinker and to be able to use statistical methods.  My introductory course “The 6 Concepts of Statistical Thinking” lays the foundations in the following.

  1. Probability – the difference between conditional & absolute probability.
  2. Risk – why it is an extension of probability and the importance of alpha (false positive) and beta (false negative) risk.
  3. Expectation – how to summarise a dataset into one number which measures its location.
  4. Variance – how to measure the spread of a dataset.
  5. Distribution – how to describe the shape of a dataset.
  6. Correlation – how to measure the relationship between two variables and understand the two golden rules of correlation.

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EU Referendum #3 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 57 days!

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January 2019 has been a month of considerable parliamentary drama in the UK as MPs wrestle over whether to approve the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU.  There is no shortage of political punditry and quotes from politicians and the whole episode is proving to be a classic example of uncertainty.  For statisticians like myself, uncertainty occurs when you cannot properly price the odds of an event happening unlike risk which occurs when you can price the odds.  Since the current state of affairs will ultimately be determined by parliamentary votes one way or the other, is it possible to use parliamentary vote data so far to estimate the odds of certain scenarios?

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UK General Elections #4 – Jeremy Corbyn’s road to Downing Street

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The fevered political climate in the UK at the moment is all about Brexit and possible second referendums and general elections.  Jeremy Corbyn made it clear recently that he wanted a General Election now so that he could take over the Brexit negotiations.  With that in mind, I decided to take a look at what Labour’s target seat strategy could look like based on the results of the 2017 general election.  What I see at the moment is that Labour has many ways of becoming the largest party in Parliament but the road to a working majority is much harder than people realise due to the Brexit realignment in 2016 and the Nationalist realignment in Scotland in 2015.

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Stats Training Materials – Multivariate Analysis

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If I were to remark to you that “the weather is very nice today” or “I didn’t like that person”, it is unlikely that I would have made such statements based on a single variable.  It is more likely that a combination of variables were evaluated to arrive at these statements.  When we analysis datasets with multiple variables, we are undertaking Multivariate Statistical Analysis.

Multivariate Analysis comes in two flavours :-

  1. Analysis of Correlations between Multiple Variables – Known as R-Analysis – Informally known as reducing the dimensionality of your dataset.
  2. Analysis of Distance between Many Objects – Known as Q-Analysis – Informally known as mapping, clustering or segmentation of your dataset.

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UK Weather Trends #7 – Autumn 2018

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Meteorologists define autumn in the UK to be the period from September to November so autumn is now over and we are officially in winter.  The 2018 autumn was consistent with the step change in the autumnal climate that took place in the 1990s.

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