Christmas is a Time for Sharing (Reading Lists and Google Trend Plots)
In his final Normal Deviance column for the year, Hugh writes on how he plans to sneak data science into the season.
It’s been a busy year. I say this partly because it’s true, but mainly because it seems to be the default answer for a lot of people at the moment when discussing work (perhaps with the occasional exception). One nice thing about reaching December/January is that it gives the opportunity to catch up on some of the reading and viewing to-do list that has built up.
For those with a data science bent, you may have a collection of things on your list to expand your toolkit for the year ahead. Here’s a few things sitting in my reading pile, for what it’s worth:
- CAS released a monograph this year (which are always worth a look) on penalised regression and credibility (a topic that close to my heart). Even more interesting is a rebuttal paper that questions its use.
- I’m often faced with statistical matching problems – trying to find a comparison group to provide a counterfactual. Causal analysis continues to develop, and there’s always a bunch of interesting things to read. Coarsened exact matching, and variants, is a popular approach that managed to pass me by, until now.
- It’s a surprisingly poorly known fact that actuaries event presentations get put up for free access. There were lots of good things at this year’s Summit that are worth a look, or a re-look.
- My deep learning knowledge is pretty patchy, but I think there’s plenty of untapped potential in conditional variational autoencoders, so will give some of the foundational papers a look.
Christmas is also the time of year for tacky themed analysis (I still like last year’s most Christmassy song sleuthing). For something a little simpler this year, here are some google trends that see some big spikes this time of year (thanks pytrends package!).
Figure 1: Google trends for selected Christmas-themed searches, 2016-2023. Darker gradients are more recent years
A few easy observations:
- Aside from a big Turkey outlier, Ham has the biggest (absolute) Christmas spike. The Turkey outlier corresponds to the February 2023 Türkiye earthquake, obviously a conflation sneaking into Google trends
- Relatively speaking, gingerbread is champion – it spends the year in virtual hibernation to pull out a credible effort in December.
- Christmas trees seem to be getting more population over time; Turkey may be fading a little.
- Mariah Carey gets a Christmas bump but it’s pretty small compared to some of the other terms tested. Stockings gets virtually nothing.
- Gift ideas and Christmas trees start early – certainly in November. The Christmas food can be left till the last week.
Now matter how you celebrate the season, I hope that the new year brings joy and refreshment. Thanks for reading (really – I love doing this column) and see you next year!
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