Spurious Correlations: The Comedy and Drama of Statistics

What not to do with statistics

By Celia Banks, PhD and Paul Boothroyd III

Introduction

Since Tyler Vigen coined the term ‘spurious correlations’ for “any random correlations dredged up from silly data” (Vigen, 2014) see: Tyler Vigen’s personal website, there have been many articles that pay tribute to the perils and pitfalls of this whimsical tendency to manipulate statistics to make correlation equal causation. See: HBR (2015), Medium (2016), FiveThirtyEight (2016). As data scientists, we are tasked with …

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