Improvement Insights Blog
Correlation not Causation
As John Johnson and Mike Gluck point out in their book, EVERYDATA, ice cream consumption and murder rates both go up in the summer, but that does not mean that eating ice cream causes murder. Rising summer temperatures seem to be involved.
They also provide a link to Tyler Vigen’s website, Spurious Correlations.
Does U.S. spending on space, science and technology cause suicides? No, but they are correlated at a 99.79%. These and other crazy correlations are available.
So don’t confuse correlation with causation.
