The von Bortkiewicz Data Set

Charles Eliot
September 2016

The von Bortkiewicz Data Set

deaths from horse kicks in 14 Prussian Army corps from 1875-1894
published in 1898 by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz
an early example of using a Poisson distribution to model rare events

Original data

Getting the data

library(vcd)
data("VonBort")

Sample data analysis

This plot shows the total number of deaths per year, summed over all 14 corps. The green trend line is based on a Poisson GLM model, and shows that the rate of deaths from horse-kicks increased by approximately 1.9% per year.

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-3

[1] "Per-year rate of increase: 1.89%"

Shiny web site

If you want to experiment with the von Bortkiewicz data set, visit this Shiny web application:

https://charleseliot.shinyapps.io/VonBort/