Having worked in finance I am a public fan of the Sharpe ratio. I have written about this here and here. One thing I have often forgotten (driving some bad analyses) is: the Sharpe ratio isn’t appropriate for models of repeated events that already have linked mean and variance (such […]
A/B tests are one of the simplest reliable experimental designs. Controlled experiments embody the best scientific design for establishing a causal relationship between changes and their influence on user-observable behavior. “Practical guide to controlled experiments on the web: listen to your customers not to the HIPPO” Ron Kohavi, Randal M […]
Some researchers (in both science and marketing) abuse a slavish view of p-values to try and falsely claim credibility. The incantation is: “we achieved p = x (with x ≤ 0.05) so you should trust our work.” This might be true if the published result had been performed as a […]
It occurred to us recently that we don’t have any articles about Bayesian approaches to statistics here. I’m not going to get into the “Bayesian versus Frequentist” war; in my opinion, which style of approach to use is less about philosophy, and more about figuring out the best way to […]
In data science work you often run into cryptic sentences like the following: Age adjusted death rates per 10,000 person years across incremental thirds of muscular strength were 38.9, 25.9, and 26.6 for all causes; 12.1, 7.6, and 6.6 for cardiovascular disease; and 6.1, 4.9, and 4.2 for cancer (all […]
In our article What is a large enough random sample? we pointed out that if you wanted to measure a proportion to an accuracy “a” with chance of being wrong of “d” then a idea was to guarantee you had a sample size of at least: This is the central […]
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn based video game where the player choses among actions (for example shooting an alien) that are labeled with a declared probability of success. Image copyright Firaxis Games A lot of gamers, after missing a 80% chance of success shot, start asking if the game’s […]
Model level fit summaries can be tricky in R. A quick read of model fit summary data for factor levels can be misleading. We describe the issue and demonstrate techniques for dealing with them.
In the previous installment of the Statistics to English Translation, we discussed the technical meaning of the term ”significant”. In this installment, we look at how significance is calculated. This article will be a little more technically detailed than the last one, but our primary goal is still to help […]
In this installment of our ongoing Statistics to English Translation series1, we will look at the technical meaning of the term ”significant”. As you might expect, what it means in statistics is not exactly what it means in everyday language. As always, a pdf version of this article is available […]