Statistical construction error

August 20, 2011

Yes, the title is meant to have two readings.

The effect

The Numbers Guy, among other examples, talks about the UK Office for National Statistics needing to revise its estimate for the construction sector output because of an error.

Original: 2.3% growth

Corrected: 0.5% growth

Here is the Telegraph article cited by The Numbers Guy.

The cause

The spreadsheet that is used to calculate the statistic was not updated properly.

Questions

Have they not read “Spreadsheet Addiction”?

Why are they not using R?

Does this scare anybody else?

Epilogue

Who would take the repercussions when the bottle is to blame?

from “Down the Mountain” by Robin E. Contreras

Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

Latest posts

Leave a Reply

Related posts

  • Quant finance blogs

    October 22, 2013

    What I've learned from updating the blogroll. New entries The easy option is to go to The Whole Street which aggregates lots of quant finance blogs. Somehow Bookstaber missed [...]

  • Four moments of portfolios

    October 14, 2013

    What good are the skewness and kurtosis of portfolios? Previously The post "Cross-sectional skewness and kurtosis: stocks and portfolios" looked at skewness and kurtosis in portfolios.  The key difference [...]

  • The look of verifying data

    October 7, 2013

    Get data that fit before you fit data. Why verify? Garbage in, garbage out. How to verify The example data used here is daily (adjusted) prices of stocks.  By [...]