My new book, Stats with Kittens, Growing up with data, charts, surveys, correlations, and other floofy playthings, is now available on Amazon. Everybody needs to understand statistics. It’s an essential part of everyday life in America, more so than any other type of higher math. Statistics isn’t just mathematics, it’s inductive reasoning with numbers. It’s […]
The feeling you get when your statistical test is significant
Creating science is like making cookies—you need a recipe, ingredients, and tools to combine the ingredients and bake the dough. If you’ve ever made cookies, you know that if you use quality ingredients and follow the recipe, everything will probably turn out fine. It helps if you have some experience with the tools you’ll use […]
Science is our perception of how things work. The scientific method is how we determine what is the current state of our science. Science is the product of the successful application of the scientific method. They are not the same. For one thing, while science changes; the scientific method is constant. When people say “trust […]
Four things to look for. Why People Hate Polls It’s probably true that everybody has taken a survey at some point or other. What’s also probably true is that most people think polling is easy. And why not? Google has a site for creating polls. Social media sites and blogging sites provide capabilities for conducting […]
Nine patterns of three types of relationships that aren’t spurious. When analysts see a large correlation coefficient, they begin speculating about possible reasons. They’ll naturally gravitate toward their initial hypothesis (or preconceived notion) which set them to investigate the data relationship in the first place. Because hypotheses are commonly about causation, they often begin with this least […]
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana History isn’t always clear-cut. It’s written by anyone with the will to write it down and the forum to distribute it. It’s valuable to understand different perspectives and the contexts that created them. The evolution of the term Data Science is a […]
Many of us have had our personal information stolen from the Internet, some more than once. Even governments can’t prevent the thefts. Professionals who work with data come under a lot of scrutiny because of PII.
An anecdote is a kitten gently licking your face with a warm, wet,
raspy tongue. Big data is a three-inch, high-pressure, firehose held an arm’s length away. They have to be treated quite differently.
Probability is the core of statistics. You hear the phrase “what’s the probability of …” all the time in statistics. You also hear that phrase in everyday life, too. What’s the probability of rain tomorrow? What’s the probability of winning the lottery? You also hear the phrase “what are the odds …? What are the […]
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