What is a trend?

The Green Cow March 31, 2013

A few days ago, a report on suicide among adolescents in The Netherlands was published online (article in Dutch). The head of the article states Less suicides among adolescents in 2011. That sounds very positive. Reading the complete article, I realised that the news was not really positive. Lets take a closer look at these data on suicide.

The numbers
The article reports that the suicides among adolescents went down from 55 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. Further it says that this cuts o the increasing trend: from 2008 to 2010 the number of suicides went up from 2008 to 2010. All these numbers sound very dramatic, given the subject. The data from the article can be summarized as in table ??. A little bit of calculation learns that the mean number of suicides among adolescents was 44.3 per year over the three years mentioned in the article. Further calculations 1 teach us that the number of suicides over these four years was increasing by 4.4 suicides per year on average. A little more research teaches us that the average number of suicides per year in this age group was 34 from 1995 till 1999, 30 from 2000 till 2004 and 36 in 2005 and 2006 2 . In this last presentation, an average number of suicides per year is given for periods of ve years. Some statistical calculations then teach us that there was an increase of 0.8 suicides per year from 1995 till 2011 3 . What is more, this increase of number of suicides per year is statistically signicant (P=0.02, which means more or less that the chance of making a mistake is 2%). Looking at the exact data over the same period might teach us something dierent 4 . So now we are not looking at ve-year average suicide numbers. When we do the same calculations on these exact data, we learn that the average increase of the numbers per year is 0.4 and the P-value is equal
1 2

by means of a simple linear regression from suicide on time report 3 again by means of a simple linear regression from suicide on time 4 take a look, in Dutch

Year 2008 2009 2010 2011

Number of suicides 34 ? 55 44 Table 1: Suicides among adolescents in The Netherlands

to 0.49 (which means, simply put, that the change of making a mistake is almost 50%). So basically, nothing is happening here. Now, I will make you some decreasing trends in the suicides among adolescents in The Netherlands. That is what we all want to see, isnt it? I take the data of three random years in the period 2000 till 2011 5 and do the same calculations. Oh wonder: the number of suicides is decreasing by 0.3 per year 6 , . Isnt that beautiful?

The explanation
A popular saying states that one can prove anything with statistics. From this example with data on the number of suicides among adolescents in The Netherlands, I illustrated that this is indeed possible. From the same data one can conclude that the numbers are going up, staying the same or are going down 7 ). How is this possible? Take a look at the complete data of suicides among teenagers (10 to 19 years old) from 2000 till 2011 (Table ??). The mean number of suicides per year over these years is 43.5. Of course, the number of suicides will not be exactly equal to this mean each year. (In this case, that is even impossible, as there is no such thing as 0.5 people that have killed themselves.) So we expect the number of suicides to be a bit above 43.5 in one year, and a bit below 43.5 in an other. Looking at the numbers we see that this seems to be the case. How much is a bit, you might ask. There are again some statistical tricks to get an idea about how far from the mean of 43.5 the numbers can get. These calculations learn that in around 95% of the years the number of suicides will be between 30.0 and 57.0 8 . We see that the numbers for the years 2000 to 2011 are all between these expected limits. So basically, there is no trend at all regarding the number of suicides per year among adolescents in The Netherlands over the last decade. No reason to panic and no reason to party. And certainly no reason for writing all kind of reports and stupid newspaper articles.
or maybe not that random I am still using linear regressions 7 a few years ago the same institution was publishing a report stating that the number of suicides increased (oh, irony 8 assuming a normal distribution and a true mean of 43.5
6 5

Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Number of suicides 48 36 45 34 41 51 48 42 34 ? 55 44 Table 2: Suicides among adolescents in The Netherlands