(This article was originally published at Simply Statistics, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
A reminder that the data we analyze are almost always not the data we want.
Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, believes embracing this uncertainty, rather than seeking to banish it, is vital when working with global health data.
“I’ve spent the last 10 years thinking about nothing else,” he said in a telephone interview. “And yes it’s absolutely essential that we continue to collect data and publish it.”
Rosling, who trained in statistics and medicine before starting the Gapminder Foundation, a non-profit venture which aims to depict the state of the world in numbers, says we must recognize that some things are easy to measure. He gives women’s fertility rates as an example, Others, like malaria deaths, are far more difficult.
“It’s not just that good data are hard to find, as that uncertainty is hard to assess,” he said.
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