Chance News 110

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Quotations

Forsooth

Statistical artifacts

Artifacts
from XKCD [1]

Artifacts-XKCD.png

Interracial marriage

Peter Doyle sent a link to this chart from the Economist:

Daily chart: Interracial marriages are rising in America
Economist, 12 June 2017
Economist 50yrsLoving.png,

Quoting from the article, one reader commented:

"Of the roughly 400,000 interracial weddings in 2015, 82% involved a white spouse, even though whites account for just 65% of America’s adult population. " If you lump the population into just two groups A and B, 100% of intergroup marriages will involve a spouse from group A, no matter what fraction of the population belongs to group A.

Exercise: 2015 census data is available by googling "us census quickfacts". While the categories don't precisely match those in this piece, you can use this data to get a rough estimate the fraction of interracial weddings that would involve a white spouse under random pairing. What do you get? Is your answer more or less than 82%?

Peter notes that he got just over 82%. Here is his solution (using Mathematica):

Doyle marriage.png