How to make fake data look meaningful

Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by minimaxir on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @02:16PM (#6770378)

I recently made a blog post on which universities have the most successful startup founders: http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/alma-mater-data/

In the post, I made it clear where the data came from, how I processed it, and additionally provided a raw copy of the data so that others could check against it.

It turns out the latter decision was especially a good idea because I received numerous comments that my data analysis was flawed, and I agree with them. Since then, I've taken additional steps to improve data accuracy, and I always provide the raw data, license-permitting.

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Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by siong1987 on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @03:03PM (#6770746)

You didn't actually clean up the data that you have tho.

Another flaw of your analysis is that you didn't look at where the founders went to school for their undergraduate/graduate(this probably doesn't matter).

I opened up the CSV and searched for "Urbana"(UIUC, where I went to school for) and counted 28 founders. In fact, some "University of Illinois" should match to UIUC too but I ignored those (for example, ZocDoc CTO).

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Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by minimaxir on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @03:38PM (#6771009)

I did attempt to clean up the data, just not enough. (I substituted for the abbreviations for 20-25 colleges. In retrospect I should have looked for a mapping online first.)

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