About CorrelationIsNotCausation.co.uk
If you have come here, then you probably already know that statistics can (and often do) lie. This is not the first web site to examine this topic. I took a more than a little inspiration from the excellent Spurious Correlations website, but I wanted to use data which was a bit more relevant to the British public, and anyway, I just fancied seeing if I could do it.
A few notes on the data itself: The data is organised by category, and data is only correlated against data from other categories to reduce the number of boring correlations. So far, I have got all of the data from freely available sources on the web. In a lot of cases, I found out that less is more. I started with a few hundred timeseries of Visitor Attraction data and lots of Weather data broken down by region, but due to the magic of statistics, the correlations between these data sets overwhelmed the more interesting ones, so I took them out. I would like to include more "Quacks and Quackery" data, so if you know of any reliable sources, please do let me know (contact details are at the bottom of the page). Also a note of thanks to Alan Henness at Zeno's Blog, whose work I shamelessly reused in order to compile the homeopathy datasets. Final point about the graphs: It's probably best not to link directly to them for now. Every now and then I reload all of the data and the Urls may change.
Some new notes on the data as a result of feedback given to me by various friends and colleagues: Thanks to Derek for pointing out the difference between negatively correlated (-1) and uncorrelated (0). Duly noted and corrected! Also thanks those who pointed out that the weather data doesn't show the absolute maximums or minimums, but the average maximums or minimums. You can read a lot more about all of that in the Met Office Website Archives if you are interested.
The site is a typical 'lamp' setup, coded in PHP and MySQL and runs on a Linux server. The client side graphs were produced using JQPlot and the server side graphs (used in Facebook shaing) were produced using pChart. At the moment, there is no advertising, but if it gets a lot of traffic, I might add some banners, just to pay for the hosting.
You can contact me via info@correlationisnotcausation.co.uk, sorry but I can't promise to answer every email, but will try.
Privacy Policy:
We do not share any information about use of this site or the Facebook page any with third-parties.
Data Deletion:
If you want us to delete information we have gathered about you from the Facebook page please contact us at info@correlationisnotcausation.co.uk.
Terms of Service:
Share away, but please do not remove our name or the name of the source of any data from anything that you share from here.
Sources:
A list of the main data sources used and where to find them is below.