Data science in action – examples in various fields

STA 101L - Summer I 2022

Raphael Morsomme

Outline

7 billion – are you typical?
200 years of history through health and wealth
Building a better NBA team through data science
When data seem to contradict widely held believes
Statistics in psychiatry and agriculture
Can you still predict elections?
Inferring ethnicity from X-rays

7 billion – are you typical?

This short video by National Geographic illustrates the various ways in which demographic variables can be summarized.

200 years of history through health and wealth

This short video and this Ted talk show the work of the public health scientist Hans Rosling who uses data visualization with great skills to tell a story.

Can you identify all 5 variables that were necessary to make the animation in the short video? Visit the Gapminder website to explore other variables.

Building a better NBA team through data science

Learn about Dr. Ivana Seric’s work for the Philadelphia 76ers in this short video. She has used her mathematical background and passion for basketball to dive in the data and help the NBA team devise better strategies.

Not interested in basketball, check this article in which the R blogger Bill K shares 10 tips for any fan of sports to become a sports data analyst.

When data seem to contradict widely held believes

In this Ted talk, Prof. Steven Levitt argues that the data do not seem to corroborate the idea that car seats are no more effective than seat belts in protecting kids from dying in cars.

Statistics in psychiatry and agriculture

Hear about the work of the statistician Susan Murphy and agricultural ecologist David Lobell, both recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Believe it or not, agriculture is where statistical methods (experiments, hypothesis tests, etc) were first used during the 1920s.

Estimating the effect of commute time on rent in New York

In this article, Carl Bialik looked at more than 100,000 homes present on StreetEasy. He observed that, unsurprisingly, the distance to the nearest metro does impact rent prices, and he even managed to put a number on that effect: $56/minute.

Source: FiverThirtyEight

Can you still predict elections?

In this podcast from Andrew Gelman, Professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, reflects on the use of statistics in election forecasting shortly before the 2020 US election.

Prof. Gelman is widely decorated and very influential statistician.

Inferring ethnicity from X-rays

In this recent article, researchers from Harvard and the MIT that AI programs are able to determine a person’s self-reported ethnicity from an X-ray image. This is noteworthy since these researchers and medical doctors in general did not know it was even possible to do so from X-rays. Which features of the image are used by the AI algorithms to accomplish this feat is still uknown.