Misc

In part 4 of this series I discussed the general problem of estimating growth rates for periods less than a year, and using Howard County’s population in the 21st century as an example calculated estimated monthly, week, daily, and even hourly growth rates for the county based on the Census population figures for 2000 and 2010. The problem with those calculations is that it’s hard to get a sense for the relative magnitude of the growth rates....

In part 3 of this series I recapped the method derived in part 2 for estimating growth rates (using Howard County’s population in the 21st century as an example) and discussed how to use such estimates to project growth in future years. Now let’s go back to a question I asked at the end of part 2: Can we calculate a more accurate estimate for the growth rate? We can begin exploring this question by going back to my original inaccurate estimate in part 1 and considering where I went wrong....

In part 2 of this series I discussed a more correct approach to the problem of estimating growth rates, using Howard County’s population in the 21st century as an example. Given the population figures for the 2000 and 2010 censuses, we can estimate an annual growth rate as follows: Divide the final population in 2010 by the initial population in 2000. Take the 10th root of the result from step 1 to find the growth factor....

In my last post I introduced the problem of estimating growth rates, using Howard County’s population in the 21st century as an example. I took a simpleminded approach: Take the difference between the county’s population in 2010 and 2000. Divide that difference by the population in 2000 and multiply by 100 to get the percentage growth increase from 2000 to 2010. Divide that percentage by 10 to get an estimate of the population growth per year....

[I’m interrupting my series of “weekend reading” posts to bring you an actual blog post.] Last week at work one of my tasks was estimating growth rates for a particular quantity (never mind exactly what). I found that doing this was not exactly trivial, as there are multiple ways to calculate growth rates, some of them more mathematically complicated than others. I think I now understand how this all works, and to test my understanding I’m going to try to explain it here....