The core of our “statistics to English translation” series is Nina Zumel’s sequence of articles:

• “I don’t think that means what you think it means;” Statistics to English Translation, Part 1: Accuracy Measures
• Statistics to English Translation, Part 2a: ’Significant’ Doesn’t Always Mean ’Important’
• Statistics to English Translation, Part 2b: Calculating Significance

If you are trying to make sense of measuing the quality of a classifier, I can’t recommend these articles highly enough.

Now one might ask, why don’t we write more of these? We do and we don’t, a lot of work of this nature has been refined and further developed in our data science / machine learning intensives.

Categories: Administrativia data science Pragmatic Data Science Pragmatic Machine Learning Statistics Statistics To English Translation Tutorials

Tagged as: Machine Learning Statistics as it should be

jmount

Data Scientist and trainer at Win Vector LLC. One of the authors of Practical Data Science with R.