By Chuan-Zheng Lee

I get that racism stirs emotions, but I try to give attempts at statistical analyses a fair hearing. About half of the work released by Labour on Saturday is actually sound. This half is also the half that has received the most criticism. Bayesian inference is a perfectly good means of developing probabilistic models about things like “based on their name, of what ethnicity is this person?” Reading Rob Salmond’s explanation of it yesterday, there’s nothing obviously untoward about this part of their methodology. I know a lot of people have felt offended about an apparent conflation of last name with role in the housing market, but strictly speaking, Labour’s analysis doesn’t imply it.

In statistical jargon, what Mr Salmond’s Bayesian analysis computes is an expectation (over Bayesian probabilities) of the number of buyers of each ethnicity, among those who bought a house between February and April with an unidentified agency representing 45% of…