4 ms·
Warning, bad science! Looking at the last plot, you can't conclude that police give out more tickets at the end of the month, unless you also conclude that pol
by Maro 14y ago
Warning, bad science!
Looking at the last plot, you can't conclude that police give out more tickets at the end of the month, unless you also conclude that police like to give out tickets around the 8th, and don't like to give out tickets around the 11th of each month.
Problem is, there are no error bars, if there were, it'd probably show that there is no significant evidence for the hypothesis. The error of the mean of the last plot is probably comparable to the signal itself.
- JunkDNA 14y agoIndeed. Whenever I see an article like this, I immediately start skimming for discussion of variance and confidence intervals. Wihout them, you can't really know what is going on.
- rpicard 14y agoI appreciate your concern! I didn't really draw any conclusions from the data, as I mentioned in the "Conclusions" sections. This wasn't meant to be hard science, just some fun with data. I did make an update with a few, more conventional statistics as well as an adjustment based on day of the week (see "Updates"): http://robert.io/posts/4.html http://robert.io/posts/4.html