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Does rainfall affect food prices in Kenya?
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Geert Barentsen
July 28, 2013
Science
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990
Does rainfall affect food prices in Kenya?
An exploratory data analysis,
carried out at @DataKindUK #DataDive,
28 July 2013,
London.
Geert Barentsen
July 28, 2013
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Transcript
Does rainfall affect food prices in Kenya? an exploratory data
analysis carried out @DataKindUK 28 July 2013 London Geert Barentsen (@GeertMcTwit) Johan Kåhrström (@JohanKahrstrom) Simone Lombardini (@SimoneLomb) Eamon Bett (@eamon_bett)
Kenya is changing.
Rainfall has decreased by up to 50% since 1980
Sure, that’s global warming, right?
Actually, no.
Kenya does not follow the global pattern Rain
Probably due to deforestation.* 1978 2008 *Source: UNEP
So what about the food prices?
Price of Maize in Kenya has risen by up to
400% since 2000.
But there is no obvious relationship between rainfall and Kenyan
Maize prices.
Or is there?
The NOAA daily rainfall data has 7300 data points.
The data could be binned in factorial(7300) = 1025035 ways.
And binning is just one (stupid) transform.
Method: we used domain expertise to fit a model to
the moving average. Model fit Interesting model
None
Result: 1998, 2009 & 2010 are anomalous years Rain season
peak (That interesting parameter)
None
Anomalous weather
Anomalous weather
Anomalous weather
So did it affect food prices?
Possibly. Anomalous weather Bad-ass global crisis Kenyan Maize price
There’s plenty of caveats.
None
Key point We greatly improved the analysis by fitting a
model which captured the domain expertise from Eamon (Kenya) and Simone (Oxfam).
Encourage data scientists to meet domain experts.
DataKind does exactly that. Good job Kate!