Saturday, July 7, 2012

Sean Carmody — The power and peril of FRED

“FRED” is the St.Louis Federal Reserve Economic Database. It is an excellent repository of economic data, currently boasting 45,000 time-series from 42 data sources. The web-site offers a powerful interface for creating charts of FRED data. Unfortunately, it is a little too powerful, offering a rather dangerous feature: the secondary axis.
I have railed against secondary axes before. They tend to lure the viewer into seeing spurious correlations....
Read it at Stubborn Mule
The power and peril of FRED
by Stubborn Mule

1 comment:

Matt Franko said...

right correlation does not mean causation ,rsp