May 13 2023
Effect of COVID-19 Vaccines on Excess Deaths
Even on LinkedIn, you still see posts and comments asserting that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t “real” and alleging that they do more harm than good. This is usually based on articles of questionable value and the author’s brother-in-law catching COVID-19 while vaccinated. Public health, however, warrants serious research and is not a matter of anecdotes.
The real question is whether the administration of these vaccines to large populations was effective in curbing the pandemic and saving lives. Today, we can answer yes to some of these questions with simple methods applied to data from the US government. Specifically, we can analyze US CDC and census data on state-by-state Excess Deaths and fractions of the population vaccinated for 2021 and 2022. The results are obvious but, sometimes, the obvious needs belaboring.
Sep 23 2023
Orbit Charts, Revisited
Data visualization is not just the art of presenting data to an audience. Upstream from this, you use visualizations in data cleaning to identify defective points, and in exploratory analysis, to identify patterns of interest. Then, you validate these patterns with a more formal analysis. Once confident that you have findings of value to communicate, you worry about making a compelling presentation.
Nick Desbarats and I had a long exchange on LinkedIn prompted by his article Connected Scatterplots Make Me Feel Dumb in Nightingale, the Data Visualization Society journal, on 8/29/2023. What he called Connected Scatterplot is what I call orbit charts, and I have found them helpful, particularly in analysis.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 2 • Tags: data science, Orbit chart, scatterplot, Visualization