Difference between revisions of "Talk:2294: Coronavirus Charts"

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The 19th COVID19 comic... :-) almost in a row. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:40, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 
The 19th COVID19 comic... :-) almost in a row. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:40, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
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I tried my hand at graphing the data for the United States, in this spreadsheet here: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W1ttxu9Dths5uOLOzk7VHd78hXG0EgeMkW5TCtdgtqw/edit?usp=sharing]. If anybody is motivated enough to add data from other countries, go ahead. As it is, this data doesn't really look anything like what Randall graphed, making me think that he just made up the lines. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.174.82|172.68.174.82]] 16:42, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Revision as of 16:42, 16 April 2020


It must be because there aren't any numbers along the axes 172.69.34.104 23:53, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I want to know if this is a random sketch with silly labels, or if Randall looked up actual data to plot it. It seems to be a combination of 4 metrics which might be reported somewhere (search popularity, death rate, total reported cases, and number of tests performed). I suspect there aren't many countries/regions for which all 4 are available, but it's conceivable that someone's published enough stats to draw this crazy plot. ¬Angel (talk) 01:39, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

What would negative results in a google search be? How do you make them a graph axis? I think its just random labels on graphs. --Lupo (talk) 05:12, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
It doesn't say negative test results for a google search. It's the number of people who've tested negative for the disease, divided by the number of people who've searched google for it. I'm moderately surprised that nobody's yet started a list of links to various data soources that could be used to plot this graph. Does Google provide per-country search frequencies? ¬Angel (talk) 09:34, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
Google Trends is always normalized so that the data returned is in [0, 100], and denormalizing out of relative values back to raw numbers is almost impossible. The best you can do is get a unitless proportion by comparing to a second search term chosen as one which doesn't vary much over time. 172.68.142.203 10:54, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
From the docs, looks like that data is simply scaled. "A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular [as its most popular day]". Using that 0-100 number as if it were an actual number of people should give the same graph, just with the units on the X-axis offset by some value. Positioning the graphs relative to each other would be harder, as the "Interest by region" chart doesn't follow the same rules; we're lacking good data for the ratio between one country and another. Angel (talk) 13:48, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Is the y-axis (death_today + cases_aweekago)/capita or death_today + (cases_aweekago/capita)? This would hugely effect the weighting of the two terms. (Parentheses in second interpretation are for clarity only, I know they change nothing mathematically.) 172.69.54.9 09:03, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps it is intentionally ambiguous to support the main point about bad charts. 172.68.142.203 10:54, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
I assumed the latter; but the page here seems to assume the former. Either way, one of the results will dwarf the other. Angel (talk) 13:48, 16 April 2020 (UTC)


The 19th COVID19 comic... :-) almost in a row. --Kynde (talk) 12:40, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

I tried my hand at graphing the data for the United States, in this spreadsheet here: [1]. If anybody is motivated enough to add data from other countries, go ahead. As it is, this data doesn't really look anything like what Randall graphed, making me think that he just made up the lines. 172.68.174.82 16:42, 16 April 2020 (UTC)