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US Vietnam War Casualties by state data can be misleading

8/5/2017

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The data set is available on Kaggle.
The code used to analyse the data is available here.

Data can and is used and abused by people with agendas - for example politicians. Let's say for some reason I want to convince you that CA made a greater sacrifice during the Vietnam war than any other state. The raw data backs up this claim but doesn't take into account CA's population size compared to other states.

​Plotting the number of casualties by state gives:
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This is a little misleading, because CA, TX and so on are large populous states so it is not surprising that the greatest number of casualties came from these states. I added in state populations from 1967 and calculated the casualty rates per capita per state, then plotted the data again:
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This map suggests Missouri had a disproportionately large casualty rate normalised by state population compared to other states while California had a relatively low casualty rate.

Don't let the politicians, media or corporations use data to trick you.
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