"In 1954, Darrell Huff wrote a neat little book called How To Lie With Statistics, a how-to guide for marketers to mislead and manipulate people into believing just about anything with the right graphic and the well-placed stat. Computationally speaking, we’ve come a long way since 1954, but in one important way nothing has changed. There’s enormous opportunity for manipulation in big data, and we need to remain skeptical and vigilant."
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, provides free data and analysis on the social
The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.
A multi-disciplinary source providing official statistics produced by countries and compiled by the United Nations data system. The resource also includes estimates and projections. Areas of coverage are: agriculture, employment, education, energy, environment, health, human development, industry, information and communication technology, national accounts, population, refugees, trade and tourism. Indicators such as Millennium Development Goals are also part of the collection.
The most recent World Bank estimates of total population, gross domestic product (GDP), and gross national income (GNI). The tables include a ranking of countries both by total size and in per capita terms
Provides data on 256 socio-economic variables under 17 categories for the 57 Organisation of the Islamic Conference OIC member countries dating back to 1970
An annual report from the World Trade Organisation, with statistical data in PDF and Microsoft Excel formats. This site also provides acces to selected historical time-series data
An established reference source, Social Trends draws together social and economic data from a wide range of government departments and other organisations; it paints a broad picture of UK society today, and how it has been changing.
a national data service providing access and support for an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, spanning many disciplines and themes
The mission of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.
Statistics is an inherent part of UNCTAD. Being the United Nations' focal point for the integrated treatment of trade and development and the interrelated issues in the areas of finance, technology, investment and sustainable development, UNCTAD compiles, validates and processes a wide range of data collected from national and international sources. Most of the time series cover long periods, with some dating back to 1948, for almost all economies of the world.
PWT is a database with information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, with country and period coverage depending on the release. On these pages you find access to several releases of this data set, as well as documentation.
As just about every statistics student can attest, Simpson's Paradox — a statistical phenomenon where an apparent trend is reversed when you look at subgroups — is notoriously hard to explain. You can look at examples — say, the fact that US wages are rising overall, but dropping within every educational group — but that don't really help to explain the paradox. But it's not really paradox at all, but simply the fact that the disparate rate at which members of the study join the subgroups isn't accounted for in the analysis. To demonstrate this effect, the Visualizing Urban Data...
D. Heurtel-Depeiges, B. Burkhart, R. Ohana, and B. Blancard. (2023)cite arxiv:2310.16285Comment: 5+6 pages, 2+3 figures, submitted to "Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences" NeurIPS Workshop.