Archive for political statistics

Le Monde lacks data scientists!

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on July 11, 2017 by xi'an

In a paper in Le Monde today, a journalist is quite critical of statistical analyses of voting behaviours regressed on socio-economic patterns. Warning that correlation is not causation and so on and so forth…But the analysis of the votes as presented in the article is itself quite appalling! Just judging from the above graph, where the vertical and horizontal axes are somewhat inverted (as predicting the proportion of over 65 in the population from their votes does not seem that relevant), with an incomprehensible drop in the over 65 proportion within a district between the votes for the fascist party and the other ones, both indicators of an inversion of the axes!, where the curves are apparently derived from four points [correction at the end explaining they used the whole data collection to draw the curve],  where the variability in the curves is not opposed to the overall variability in the population, where more advanced tools than mere correlation are not broached upon, and so on… They should have asked Andrew. Or YouGov!

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