2 posts
So. Correlations. They're fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.
My previous post about p-values has reminded me that I've been meaning to brush up on my statistics. I'm hoping to do this by writing a series of tutorials for this blog, and to keep things interesting for my less statistically-inclined readers, the datasets I'll be using will be campaign finance and lobbying information from Open Secrets and Sunlight Labs. So come, join me as I learn about quantitative analysis and also the pervasive corruption of our government\... The data in this post are from .OpenSecrets.org and represent the total contributions from commercial banks to individual house members in the current (2011-2012) election cycle.