Peter Ellis

@peter_ellis
615 Followers
515 Following
638 Posts
Director, Statistics for Development Division, at the Pacific Community. Tweets only represent my views, and are most likely to be about data and #rstats, maybe with bits of history, meta science and philosophy thrown in.
Tag1#rstats
Tag2#pacific
Work websitehttps://sdd.spc.int/
Personal bloghttps://freerangestats.info
Peter Ellis3d ago
I have blogged at more length than usual on Pacific #demography issues, tying together with narrative the charts produced in six #rstats posts starting late last year. The theme is the obvious that people movement is critically important in the Pacific. https://freerangestats.info/blog/2026/03/22/pacific-people-narrative
Peter EllisFeb 16
Auckland is the world's biggest Pacific Islander city, but which is second? Turns out to be Port Moresby, followed by several Indonesian cities of West New Guinea. Blog post in my series on Pacific people movement issues, with #rstats code, at https://freerangestats.info/blog/2026/02/16/pacific-cities
Peter EllisFeb 13
Scatter plots are cool! Inspired by Branko Milanovic's *Visions of Inequality* , I drew some as alternative ways of visualising historic social tables of income and population by class. Blog post, with #rstats code, at https://freerangestats.info/blog/2026/02/08/social-table-visualisations
Peter EllisDec 29
I have put together an index page compiling my various #rstats blog posts using #Pacific island countries and territories' data:
https://freerangestats.info/blog/pacific.html Topics such as choropleth maps of the Pacific, demographic techniques and trends, and multidimensional vulnerability.
Peter EllisOct 18
Countries with more economic inequality have higher homicide rates. But for any given country, the relationship isn't as strong. This poses a multilevel modelling problem that it's easy to trip over. I tripped, righted (I hope), and blogged about it with #rstats. https://freerangestats.info/blog/2025/10/18/homicide-and-gini
Peter EllisOct 5

I drew a map with #rstats of the locations involved in the Ameila Earhart / Fred Noonan disappearance in 1937. The sequence of events required for there to be anything helpful and new in US archives are pretty implausible. Most likely they fell in the sea, sadly.

https://freerangestats.info/blog/2025/10/05/earhart-map

Peter EllisSep 23, 2025
It turns out I have been #rstats blogging continuously for 10 years. I reflect on how and why in this post. Key message, probably unsurprising, is that blogging primarily meets my own needs to play around and learn with code and data. Audiences second, I'm afraid. https://freerangestats.info/blog/2025/09/24/ten-years
Ten year anniversary of Free Range Statistics

A reflection on ten years, 225 posts and 350,000 words of the Free Range Statistics blog. Blogging works for me because it meets my own needs in the first instance, particularly by motivating learning and giving me a structured platform to engage with things I find interesting.

free range statistics
Peter EllisSep 6, 2025
New #rstats, #economics and #demography blog post at https://freerangestats.info/blog/2025/09/07/png. Looks at the issues of choice of deflator for real GDP; uncertainty in population estimates; formal employment; and vaccination rates.
Show threadPeter EllisAug 23, 2025
I talk about accessing the UN #SDGs database API from #rstats; I had to do this pretty crudely, but it works. I needed this data because there is an SDG indicator on time spent on domestic and care work. There's some fiddly extra cleaning needed because of countries' differing ideas of age groups.
Show threadPeter EllisAug 23, 2025
For example, I show how to control the colour of individual edges connecting notes in a diagram drawn with {{ggdag}}. This was surprisingly fiddly and I couldn't find how to do this documented anywhere.