“Weather and My Productivity”, Gwern2013-03-19 (tabular ML, R, QS, psychology, power analysis; backlinks)⁠:

Rain or shine affect my mood? Not much.

Weather is often said to affect our mood, and that people in sunnier places are happier because of that. Curious about the possible effect (it could be worth controlling for in my future QS analyses or attempting to imitate benefits inside my house eg. brighter lighting), I combine my long-term daily self-ratings with logs from the nearest major official weather stations, which offer detailed weather information about temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloud cover, wind speed, brightness etc, and try to correlate them.

In general, despite considerable data, there are essentially no bivariate correlations, nothing in several versions of a linear model, and nothing found by a random forest. It would appear that weather does not correlate with my self-ratings to any detectable degree, much less cause it.

• Data
• Analysis
  • Exploratory
  • Modeling
    • Continuous MP
      • Linear Model
    • Random Forests Regression
    • Categorical MP
      • Logistic Model
      • Random Forests Classification
      • Ordinal vs Random Forests
    • Model Checking
      • Error Rate
• Conclusion
• Appendix
  • Autocorrelation

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