Spurious Correlations

197 psl.

English kalba

Publikuota 2015 m. gegužės 11 d., Hachette Books.

ISBN:
978-0-316-33943-8
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Is there a correlation between Nic Cage films and swimming pool accidents? What about beef consumption and people getting struck by lightning? Absolutely not. But that hasn't stopped millions of people from going to tylervigen.com and asking, "Wait, what?" Vigen has designed software that scours enormous data sets to find unlikely statistical correlations. He began pulling the funniest ones for his website and has since gained millions of views, hundreds of thousands of likes, and tons of media coverage. Subversive and clever, Spurious Correlations is geek humor at its finest, nailing our obsession with data and conspiracy theory.

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apžvelgė autoriaus Tyler Vigen knygą Spurious Correlations

A fun look at statistical correlations and why you should be wary of most of them

A hilarious book full of graphs that show that "correlation does not equal causation" by providing graphs filled with rather ridiculous correlations. The book has sections comparing food and drinks, science and technology, culture, personalities and others correlated with rather ridiculous things (most famously, Nicholas Cage film appearances against people drowning in swimming pools).

What the graphs show is that if you dig through enough time related data and compare them with other data, you will most likely discover that they are correlated, even though they should have nothing to do with each other. That is a danger that people should be aware of when shown graphs about apparently correlated data without the required causation. And the ridiculous examples of correlations in this book serve to highlight the danger.