New blog title poll!

I’d like to change the title of this blog, so I solicited suggestions on Twitter and Facebook. There were some great ones! Then I held a poll.

# WARNING: public use of this package can lead to social media abuse. 
library("tidyverse") 

poll <- tribble(
  ~Title, ~votes,
  "Irregularly Tyre-annical", 2,
  "Tyre Repair", 7,
  "Small things done great", 0,
  "Where the rubber meets the road", 6
)

ggplot(data = poll, aes(x=reorder(Title, votes), y = votes)) + 
  geom_col() +
  theme_minimal() + 
  coord_flip() + 
  labs(y = "Title", x = "Votes")

Boo. My personal contribution scored 0. Although the winner is “Tyre Repair”¹, the sample size is small, and I couldn’t help wondering if there was a statistically significant difference between that and “Where the rubber meets the road”². This is a blog partly about statistics after all.

library("EMT")
mt <- multinomial.test(poll$votes, prob = rep(1/4, 4))

## 
##  Exact Multinomial Test, distance measure: p
## 
##     Events    pObs    p.value
##        816   2e-04     0.0171

But that’s not a terribly interesting hypothesis – it says that my voters care what title I use. What I really want to know is if there is any that beats all the others. I discovered a post-hoc test for for the Exact GOF, essentially testing each category against the sum of the others, and using Bonferroni corrections. So I’ll have 4 comparisons, and thus my p value should be less than 0.05/4 = 0.0125.

pvals <- tribble(
  ~Comparison, ~p,
  "Irregularly Tyre-annical vs. others",  multinomial.test(c(2,13), prob = c(0.25, 0.75))$p.value,
  "Tyre Repair vs. others",  multinomial.test(c(7,8), prob = c(0.25, 0.75))$p.value,
  "Small things done great vs. others",  multinomial.test(c(0,15), prob = c(0.25, 0.75))$p.value,
  "Where the rubber meets the road vs. others",  multinomial.test(c(6,9), prob = c(0.25, 0.75))$p.value
)

I had to hide the results of that code chunk because package EMT isn’t very nice about output.

knitr::kable(pvals)

So, basically none of the individual titles can be ruled out! Hmmm. Maybe I have the wrong hypotheses here.

Well, there was also a great write-in candidate “Entyrely Optional”³, and protests to re-open the polls erupted. So I think I will try again with the top two from the first round plus the new candidate.