Category: open data

Are certain legislative bill topics more likely to pass?

Data science is able to detect anomalies, such as fraud and security anomalies. Can it also be used to find sneaky political practices? Quantifying and featuring-izing the “messy” world of politics can elucidate order and truth. Politics is one of the most important yet uninteresting place to the public, who have everything to gain and lose from every day decisions. Note: This post was written before Trump was elected to office…

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Time Series: In Los Angeles is domestic violence crimes seasonal?

It’s not news that there has been a nation wide hike in crimes across the United States, including Los Angeles. NPR episode on LAPD. Inequality and crimes against fellow humans are disheartening and could often seem impossible to resolve. Open data provides one resource for viewing impossible problems and collaborating on solutions. In this analysis, LA city domestic violence counts are viewed in time series and compared by areas in the city.

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The Problem of Data Aggregation in People Metrics

This analysis is a reaction to Kansas City Star article, “Asian-Americans narrow wealth gap, new studies show,” which oversimplifies income and race trends. It aggregates “Asian-Americans” into a group and tells the story of averages. This is not uncommon in major coverage of demographics and Asian Americans. In demonstrating issues with disaggregation, data from U.S. Census dataset from UCI Machine Learning Library, here and here, are compared with the findings from a St. Louis (STL) Federal Reserve paper on The Demographics of Wealth. Demographic data aggregation tells the wrong story of income and race in the United States. There are cases where metrics should be aggregated but in those cases the advantages must be laid out.

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