Posts about economic and political topics
The global lockdown has slowed down mobility considerably. This can be seen in the data produced by our ubiquitous mobile phones.
Apple is kind enough to make those anonymized and aggregated data available to the public. If you want to learn how to get a handle on those data and analyze trends with R read on!
Continue reading “COVID-19: Analyze Mobility Trends with R”
One of the biggest problems of the COVID-19 pandemic is that there are no reliable numbers of infections. This fact renders many model projections next to useless.
If you want to get to know a simple method how to roughly estimate the real number of infections and expected deaths in the US, read on!
Continue reading “COVID-19 in the US: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation of Actual Infections and Future Deaths”
Correlation and its associated challenges don’t lose their fascination: most people know that correlation doesn’t imply causation, not many people know that the opposite is also true (see: Causation doesn’t imply Correlation either) and some know that correlation can just be random (so-called spurious correlation).
If you want to learn about a paradoxical effect nearly nobody is aware of, where correlation between two uncorrelated random variables is introduced just by sampling, read on!
Continue reading “Collider Bias, or Are Hot Babes Dim and Eggheads Ugly?”
It is such a beautiful day outside, lot’s of sunshine, spring at last… and we are now basically all grounded and sitting here, waiting to get sick.
So, why not a post from the new epicentre of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Central Europe, more exactly where I live: Germany?! Indeed, if you want to find out what the numbers tell us how things might develop here, read on!
Continue reading “COVID-19: The Case of Germany”
Valentine’s Day is around the corner and love is in the air… but, shock horror, nearly every second marriage ends in a divorce! Unfortunately, I can tell you first hand that this is an experience you’d rather not have. In this post, we see how data science, in the form of the OneR package and an interesting new data set, might potentially help you to avoid that tragedy… so read on!
Continue reading “The One Question you should ask your Partner before Marrying!”
Happy New Year to all of you! 2020 is here and it seems that we are being overwhelmed by more and more irrationality, especially fake news and conspiracy theories.
In this post, I will give you some indication that this might actually not be the case (shock horror: good news alert!). We will be using Google Trends for that: If you want to know what Google Trends is, learn how to query it from within R and process the retrieved data, read on!
Continue reading “Psst, don’t tell anybody: The World is getting more rational!”
The two most disruptive political events of the last few years are undoubtedly the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump. Both are commonly associated with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and a technique known as Microtargeting.
If you want to understand the data science behind the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal and Microtargeting (i.e. LASSO regression) by building a toy example in R read on!
Continue reading “Cambridge Analytica: Microtargeting or How to catch voters with the LASSO”
Tomorrow, on the First of May, many countries celebrate the so called International Workers’ Day (or Labour Day): time to talk about the unequal distribution of wealth again, so read on!
Continue reading “The Rich didn’t earn their Wealth, they just got Lucky”
One of the topics that is totally hyped at the moment is obviously Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. There are many self-proclaimed experts running around trying to sell you the stuff they have been doing all along under this new label.
When you ask them what AI means you will normally get some convoluted explanations (which is a good sign that they don’t get it themselves) and some “success stories”. The truth is that many of those talking heads don’t really know what they are talking about, yet happen to have a friend who knows somebody who picked up a book at the local station bookshop… ok, that was nasty but unfortunately often not too far away from the truth.
So, what is AI really? This post tries to give some guidance, so read on!
Continue reading “So, what is AI really?“
…the richest man on earth would have a fortune of no more than $43,000! If you don’t believe me read this post!
Continue reading “If wealth had anything to do with intelligence…”
