Spanking and Spreadsheets: Data-driven Sex Journalism

Heather Nolis and Jacqueline Nolis | csv,conf,v4 | May 7, 2019

When we saw that the Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newspaper, was running a survey on kinks and sexual preferences, we knew we had to get our hands on the data. We convinced the that using machine learning methods on the responses would be a good idea, and then we quickly set out to analyzing them. In this talk we will cover how we made sense of the lewd data, the statistical methods we used (and failures we produced), as well as the final results that ended up in our feature article: “There Are Four Kinds of Sex Partners (which one are you).”