{"id":945,"date":"2014-04-28T03:07:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-28T08:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=945"},"modified":"2014-04-28T03:07:46","modified_gmt":"2014-04-28T08:07:46","slug":"picking-a-baby-name-thats-uniquely-popular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2014\/picking-a-baby-name-thats-uniquely-popular\/","title":{"rendered":"Picking a Baby Name That’s Uniquely Popular"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re letting the whole Internet vote on the name for our baby<\/a>, so it might seem a little strange that I’m posting about picking a name that’s unique. Why bother with a poll if you don’t want a popular name? What does uniquely popular mean, anyway?<\/p>\n

Looking at the data right now, Alexander is comfortably in the lead. But Alexander is also a very popular name in general right now – it was the 9th most popular name for boys in 2012 according to the U.S. SSA<\/a>. So, I’d like to see if some names are getting more votes in our poll than you would expect just by general popularity.<\/p>\n

I did a similar analysis<\/a> when we did this for my daughter five years ago. Back then I used SPSS and a little more statistical rigor, but I haven’t had a chance to play around with R to do something similar yet. For now I’ll stick to what I can do in Google Spreadsheets.<\/p>\n

Here’s a plot of each name, showing the number of votes in our poll vs the number of babies with that name in 2012:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So what does this tell us? First off, the names seem to line up more or less on a line going up and to the right. This means there’s probably a correlation between our poll and popularity in the U.S. Google Spreadsheets has a function to give you the correlation coefficient called CORREL(). Right now this is 0.69, which is a pretty strong correlation.<\/p>\n

Second, if we guesstimate where we would have to put a straight line to best fit these points, we can see which names are above the line – right now, it’s Nikola, Luka, and Finn, with Soren maybe just peeking over the top. If we want to pick names that are uniquely popular<\/strong> in our poll, those are good choices.<\/p>\n

I’ve plotted the U.S. Babies in 2012 totals on a log scale for two reasons – first, it’s much easier to read this way, and second, it doesn’t look like baby names are distributed very evenly:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is from U.S. SSA data again. In this chart you can see that a very small number of the most popular names (at the left side of the graph) are given to a very large number of babies. Looking toward the right of the graph, there’s a very long tail of many names given to much smaller numbers of babies.<\/p>\n

This looks like it might be a Zipf distribution<\/a>, which is a pretty common distribution for data like wordcounts and website popularity. If we shift that graph to a log scale it starts to look more like a straight line.<\/p>\n

By the way, if you haven’t voted on our baby name poll yet, go ahead and vote now<\/a><\/strong> – this baby is coming soon! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re letting the whole Internet vote on the name for our baby, so it might seem a little strange that I’m posting about picking a name that’s unique. Why bother with a poll if you don’t want a popular name? What does uniquely popular mean, anyway? Looking at the data right now, Alexander is comfortably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[614,496,514,734],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-baby-name","tag-baby-names","tag-statistical-analysis","tag-zipf"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":950,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}