Tag Archives: correlation

The Ecological Fallacy: What Does It Have To Do With Us?

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Image Credit: Erik Karits, Pixabay licence, Image Cropped

Every once and awhile the term “ecological fallacy” gets thrown around to critique a particular study. Some Twitter discussion around this pre-print, which compares COVID-19 mortality to vegetable consumption at a country level, got me thinking about the term again. So let’s go through what it is, why it’s a problem, and why sometimes it can’t be avoided.

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The Independence Assumption and its Foe, Spatial Correlation

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When animals like these wolves travel in packs, spotting one individual means we're more likely to spot another soon after. So how do we come up with a reliable population estimate in situations like these? (Image Credit: Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)

When animals like these wolves travel in packs, spotting one individual means we’re more likely to spot another soon after. So how do we come up with a reliable population estimate in situations like these? (Image Credit: Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)

The thought of an ecologist may conjure the image of a scientist spending their time out in the field counting birds, looking for moss, studying mushrooms. Yet whilst field ecologists remain an integral part of modern ecology, the reality is that much of the discipline has come to rely on complex models. These are the processes which allow us to estimate figures like the 1 billion animals that have died in the recent Australian bushfires, or the potential spread of species further polewards as climate change warms our planet.

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