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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Correlation and causation

Marc Abrahams in Improbable Research


Tyler Vigen’s “Spurious Correlations” web site presents many spurious correlations.

Correlation does not imply causation, or so they say. What causes people to say that? You might ask that question of Tyler Vigen, who is a student at Harvard Law School and a former store detective (at Macy’s) and also formerly a military geospacial intelligence analyst.

Or you might ask Wikipedia. Or ask XKCD. Correlation does, by the way, imply correlation.

Here’s one of Tyler Vigen’s spurious correlations:




boat-kentucky

Here’s another:


 doctorates-cheese