Spurious Correlations

by Tyler Vigen

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Pub Date May 12 2015 | Archive Date Jun 01 2015

Description

Military intelligence analyst and Harvard Law student Tyler Vigen illustrates the golden rule that "correlation does not equal causation" through hilarious graphs inspired by his viral website.

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.

Available Editions

EDITION	Hardcover
ISBN	9780316339438
PRICE	$20.00 (USD)

Additional Information

Average rating from 2 members

Featured Reviews

David W, Media/Journalist

We drown in data. Supposed trends assault us daily. Idiotic predictions are based on current data only. Who puts all this data together to get these conclusions? Tyler Vigen has asked a computer to pair charts by how similar the curves were. Relevance was irrelevant. The results make little sense, but point to how laughable the data we live by can be. My fave: there is a 99.3% correlation between alcohol purchased in liquor stores and the number of bridges in the United States. Hmmm, I hear you say. What can we make of this?

Which is precisely Vigen’s point.

The book is largely white space. One page has the titles of the two data streams, and the other has the actual chart of them, with a sidebar of some trivia associated with one of the streams, showing he actually did some research. Maybe. Very cute, very enjoyable, and very telling.

David Wineberg