Nigel Marriott's Blog

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

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UK Economy Tracker #1 – 2018 Q2

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The headline of the second quarter of 2018 is the lowest unemployment rate since 1975.  Economic Inactivity continues to be at record lows, inflation is falling and the budget deficit is shrinking.  However, GDP growth continues to be sluggish which means our pay is stagnating and we have record levels of debt to pay off.  History tells us that the odds of another recession soon will rise from now on so there is still a need to change the state of our economy.

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UK Weather Trends #5 – Spring 2018

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Meteoologists define spring in the UK to be the period from March to May so spring is now over and we are officially in summer.  The 2018 spring was very sunny but this hides the fact that our spring climate has changed quite notably over the last 25 years.

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UK Economy Tracker #0 – My New Tracker Explained!

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Welcome to my first tracker post of the UK economy!  I intend this to be similar in format to my UK Weather Tracker except that it will be published quarterly rather than monthly.  In this post I will explain the statistics I have chosen to track.

I am a big believer in placing recent statistics in their historical context.  Nothing annoys me more than someone overexplaining a small dip in GDP which in historical terms is absolutely meaningless.  Unfortunately we live in a world cursed by the year on year comparison without any understanding of basic time series concepts such as autocorrelation and reversion to the mean.  So one hope I have with my Economy Tracker is to improve this state of affairs.

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Pay Gap#0 – Where can I find gender pay gap data?

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The government requires all organisations employing 250 or more employees to submit gender pay gap data.  The first set of submissions were completed in April 2018 but these figures refer to pay made in April 2017 i.e. a year ago.  Organisations can submit their 2018 data now if they wish and not wait for the deadline of April 2019.  All data is available to the public and can be found on the government’s gender pay gap website.  I have downloaded this data and created a spreadsheet tool to present the data in a more user-friendly and visual format.

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EPL 2017/18 #4 – My Prediction of the Final League Table – Round 33

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After many weeks of a relegation dogfight involving up to 10 teams, it now appears that an exciting finish to the 2018 EPL season is becoming less likely as a gap opens up between the bottom 3 and the rest.  After 34 matches, another gap is opening up between the 4 prediction methods I use and one method so far has a 74% success rate in predicting the match outcome.

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