Age-heaping and Hedgehogs

I heard an interesting talk a few weeks ago about “age-heaping” in survey responses, the phenomenon where people remember ages imprecisely and say that their siblings are ages that are divisible by 5 much more often than expected.  There are some nice theory challenges here, with a big dose of stats modeling, but I’ll have to share some more thoughts on that later.

In the talk, the age-heaping was also referred to a a hedgehog or porcupine plot, because of the spikey histogram that the data produces.  I was looking for a nice picture of one, or some additional background reading, and when I searched for “hedgehog statistical plots”, all google would give me was a bunch of pages about stats on actual hedgehogs.  Cute!

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3 responses to “Age-heaping and Hedgehogs

  1. While we’re on the topic of animals and stats, check out the adorable elephant: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elephant/

  2. A. Flaxman

    @kjforeman: So cute, I love it!

  3. My brother Seth emailed in an example: