In recent years, under the influence of statisticians, the medical profession has dialed back on screening tests. With relatively rare conditions, widespread testing yields many false positives and doctor visits, whose collective cost can outweigh benefits. Coronavirus advice follows this line – testing is limited to the truly ill (this is also due to aContinue reading “Coronavirus: To Test or Not to Test”
Daily Archives: March 17, 2020
Mar 16: Statistics in Practice
In this week’s Brief, we look at combining models. Our course spotlight is April 17 – May 1: Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) You’ve probably seen lots of references to MLE in other contexts – this quick 2-week course (only $299) is your chance to study it on its own. See you in class! – PeterContinue reading “Mar 16: Statistics in Practice”
Regularized Model
In building statistical and machine learning models, regularization is the addition of penalty terms to predictor coefficients to discourage complex models that would otherwise overfit the data. An example is ridge regression.