TeachingDemos (version 2.7)

stork: Neyman's Stork data

Description

Data invented by Neyman to look at spurious correlations and adjusting for lurking variables by looking at the relationship between storks and biths.

Usage

data(stork)

source

Kronmal, Richard A. (1993) Spurious Cerrolation and the Fallacy of the Ratio Standard Revisited. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, Vol. 156, No. 3, 379-392.

Details

This is an entertaining example to show a relationship that is due to a third possibly lurking variable. The source paper shows how completely different relationships can be found by mis-analyzing the data.

References

Neyman, J. (1952) Lectures and Conferences on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, 2nd edn, pp. 143-154. Washington DC: US Department of Agriculture.

Examples

data(stork)
pairs(stork[,-1], panel=panel.smooth)
## maybe str(stork) ; plot(stork) ...