{"id":5754,"date":"2012-02-08T05:00:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T10:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=5754"},"modified":"2012-02-08T08:26:27","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T13:26:27","slug":"hipstermetrics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/5754","title":{"rendered":"Hipstermetrics"},"content":{"rendered":"

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At first we were convinced that 100 percent of the variance in bike market size could be explained by the population density of a city. If you live an a densely populated area like San Francisco, bicycling is an efficient way to get around the city. If you live in Los Angeles, getting on a bicycle can\u2019t really get you anywhere. To our surprise, population density has a nearly zero correlation with our bicycle index.\u00a0If anything, it very weakly suggests the more densely populated the city, the less\u00a0prevalence\u00a0of biking.<\/p>\n

That’s from a post<\/a> titled “The Fixie Bike Index,” on the Priceonomics Blog.<\/p>\n

If, like me, you are nowhere near hip enough to know what a fixie is, let me spare you a Google search: a fixie is a fixed-gear bicycle, which is apparently a much-coveted item among hipsters. That’s right: grown men and women enjoy riding around town on a bike like the one you and I used to ride when we were 8 years old.<\/p>\n

That being said, let’s go back to the image above. Note how the above-referenced post explains how “population density has a nearly zero correlation with our bicycle index,” which, “[i]f anything, (…) very weakly suggests the more densely populated the city, the less\u00a0prevalence\u00a0of biking.”<\/p>\n

I guess someone missed the lecture on how sensitive the mean is to outliers back in college. A quick look at the scatter plot and regression line above indicate that the latter is driven by the point on the far right.<\/p>\n

Remove that point, and it looks like there might be a positive relationship between a city’s bike index and the density of its population.\u00a0Trim all four outliers, and it’s really not obvious what is going on.<\/p>\n

Surely there’s a bookshop in Williamsburg that has a used copy of Kennedy’s Guide to Econometrics<\/a><\/em> for sale?<\/p>\n

(HT: @mungowitz<\/a>‘s\u00a0snark<\/a>, which is not to be confused with Echidna’s Arf<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first we were convinced that 100 percent of the variance in bike market size could be explained by the population density of a city.…<\/p>\n

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