Data awareness: Age of Miss America and murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects

Why is the age of Miss America linked to murders by steam and hot objects?

It's not. It's part of our series on "contrived correlations" and another lesson to be careful when looking at data and what it means.

Despite being highly correlated, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.87, the age of Miss America and murders by steam and hot objects are clearly entirely unconnected. 

Examples such as this give a helpful lesson to be mindful when looking at and interpreting data, whether in your own analysis or when presented by the media or politicians. Not all data sets that are correlated will be so obviously unrelated as the example above. Even professional statisticians and analysts are not immune to falling into the trap of spurious correlations. 

The example here shows that even data sets with seemingly distinct patterns of variation can be found to correlate strongly with unrelated data sets if you search far and wide enough. While it may be easy to find correlations between simple linear data sets, for example, these can be just as causally unconnected as the age of Miss America and murders by steam, hot vapours, and hot objects.