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The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data



The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data PDF

Author: David Spiegelhalter

Publisher: Pelican

Genres:

Publish Date: March 28, 2019

ISBN-10: 0241398630

Pages: 448

File Type: PDF

Language: English

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Book Preface

Why We Need Statistics
Harold Shipman was Britain’s most prolific convicted murderer, though he does not fit the archetypal profile of a serial killer. A mild-mannered family doctor working in a suburb of Manchester, between 1975 and 1998 he injected at least 215 of his mostly elderly patients with a massive opiate overdose. He finally made the mistake of forging the will of one of his victims so as to leave him some money: her daughter was a solicitor, suspicions were aroused, and forensic analysis of his computer showed he had been retrospectively changing patient records to make his victims appear sicker than they really were. He was well known as an enthusiastic early adopter of technology, but he was not tech-savvy enough to realize that every change he made was time-stamped (incidentally, a good example of data revealing hidden meaning).
Of his patients who had not been cremated, fifteen were exhumed and lethal levels of diamorphine, the medical form of heroin, were found in their bodies. Shipman was subsequently tried for fifteen murders in 1999, but chose not to offer any defence and never uttered a word at his trial. He was found guilty and jailed for life, and a public inquiry was set up to determine what crimes he might have committed apart from those for which he had been tried, and whether he could have been caught earlier. I was one of a number of statisticians called to give evidence at the public inquiry, which concluded that he had definitely murdered 215 of his patients, and possibly 45 more.2
This book will focus on using statistical sciencefn1 to answer the kind of questions that arise when we want to better understand the world – some of these questions will be highlighted in a box. In order to get some insight into Shipman’s behaviour, a natural first question is:

The public inquiry provided details of each victim’s age, gender and date of death. Figure 0.1 is a fairly sophisticated visualization of this data, showing a scatter-plot of the age of victim against their date of death, with the shading of the points indicating whether the victim was male or female. Bar-charts have been superimposed on the axes showing the pattern of ages (in 5–year bands) and years.
Some conclusions can be drawn by simply taking some time to look at the figure. There are more black than white dots, and so Shipman’s victims were mainly women. The bar-chart on the right of the picture shows that most of his victims were in their 70s and 80s, but looking at the scatter of points reveals that although initially they were all elderly, some younger cases crept in as the years went by. The bar-chart at the top clearly shows a gap around 1992 when there were no murders. It turned out that before that time Shipman had been working in a joint practice with other doctors but then, possibly as he felt under suspicion, he left to form a single-handed general practice. After this his activities accelerated, as demonstrated by the top bar-chart.

This analysis of the victims identified by the inquiry raises further questions about the way he committed his murders. Some statistical evidence is provided by data on the time of day of the death of his supposed victims, as recorded on the death certificate. Figure 0.2 is a line graph comparing the times of day that Shipman’s patients died to the times that a sample of patients of other local family doctors died. The pattern does not require subtle analysis: the conclusion is sometimes known as ‘inter-ocular’, since it hits you between the eyes. Shipman’s patients tended overwhelmingly to die in the early afternoon.
The data cannot tell us why they tended to die at that time, but further investigation revealed that he performed his home visits after lunch, when he was generally alone with his elderly patients. He would offer them an injection that he said was to make them more comfortable, but which was in fact a lethal dose of diamorphine: after a patient had died peacefully in front of him, he would change their medical record to make it appear as if this was an expected natural death. Dame Janet Smith, who chaired the public inquiry, later said, ‘I still do feel it was unspeakably dreadful, just unspeakable and unthinkable and unimaginable that he should be going about day after day pretending to be this wonderfully caring doctor and having with him in his bag his lethal weapon …which he would just take out in the most matter-of-fact way.’


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