EdgeworthDeaths R Documentation

## Edgeworth's Data on Death Rates in British Counties

### Description

In 1885, Francis Edgeworth published a paper, On methods of ascertaining variations in the rate of births, deaths and marriages. It contained among the first examples of two-way tables, analyzed to show variation among row and column factors, in a way that Fisher would later formulate as the Analysis of Variance.

Although the data are rates per 1000, they provide a good example of a two-way ANOVA with n=1 per cell, where an additive model fits reasonably well.

Treated as frequencies, the data is also a good example of a case where the independence model fits reasonably well.

### Usage

data("EdgeworthDeaths")

### Format

A data frame with 42 observations on the following 3 variables.

County

a factor with levels Berks Herts Bucks Oxford Bedford Cambridge

year

an ordered factor with levels 1876 < 1877 < 1878 < 1879 < 1880 < 1881 < 1882

Freq

a numeric vector, death rate per 1000 population

### Details

Edgeworth's data came from the Registrar General's report for the final year, 1883. The Freq variable represents death rates per 1000 population in the six counties listed.

### Source

The data were scanned from Table 5.2 in Stigler, S. M. (1999) Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods, Harvard University Press.

### References

Edgeworth, F. Y. (1885). On Methods of Ascertaining Variations in the Rate of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 48(4), 628-649. doi:10.2307/2979201

### Examples

data(EdgeworthDeaths)

# fit the additive ANOVA model
library(car)  # for Anova()
EDmod <- lm(Freq ~ County + year, data=EdgeworthDeaths)
Anova(EDmod)

# now, consider as a two-way table of frequencies

library(vcd)
library(MASS)
structable( ~ County + year, data=EdgeworthDeaths)
loglm( Freq ~ County + year, data=EdgeworthDeaths)

mosaic( ~ County + year, data=EdgeworthDeaths,