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We encountered “Type III error” when it turned out that most people answering our Puzzle question were, in fact, answering a different question from the one that was asked. Type III error is answering the wrong question, and it is a big factor in the…

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” So said Barry Goldwater, running for U.S. President in 1964. At the time, the voters rejected his pitch for purity, and his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, won a…

The recent U.S. election was one of the most controversial and closest ever, and turnout percentage may be the highest in a century. Still, 37% of the voting age population did not vote. The traditional explanation for why people don’t vote is that they feel…

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said Alexander Pope in 1711; he could have been speaking of the use of statistics by experts in all fields. In this article, we look at three consequential mistakes in the field of statistics. Two of them are famous, the third required a deep dive into the corporate annual reports of

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said Alexander Pope in 1711; he could have been speaking of the use of statistics by experts in all fields. In this article, we look at three consequential mistakes in the field of statistics. Two of them are famous, the third required a deep dive into the corporate annual reports of

Researchers and analysts are familiar with the famous 5% benchmark in statistics, the typical probability threshold at which a result becomes statistically significant.  (The probability in question is the probability that a result as interesting as the real-life result will happen in the null model.) …

By Will Goodrum* Your company has made it a strategic priority to become more data-driven. Good! A major anticipated component of this transition is to implement new data technology (e.g., a data lake). Resources are thrown at identifying source systems and pulling information into a…

By John Elder, Founder and Chair of Elder Research, Inc.  Last week, in Recidivism, and the Failure of AUC, we saw how the use of “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) concealed bias against African-Americans defendants in a model predicting recidivism, that is, which defendants would re-offend. …

On average, 40% - 50% of convicted criminals in the U.S. go on to commit another crime (“recidivate”) after they are released.  For nearly 20 years, court systems have used statistical and machine learning algorithms to predict the probability of recidivism, and to guide sentencing…

In casual statistical analysis, you sometimes hear references to outliers, along with the suggestion that they should be ignored or dropped from the analysis.  Quite the contrary: often it is the outliers that convey useful information.  They may represent errors in data collection, e.g. a…

In his book Predictive Analytics, Eric Siegel tells the story of marketing efforts at Telenor, a Norwegian telecom, to reduce churn (customers leaving for another carrier). Sophisticated analytics were used to guide the campaigns, but the managers gradually discovered that some campaigns were backfiring:  they…

Guest Blog - Grant Fleming, Data Scientist, Elder Research Progress in data science is largely driven by the ever-improving predictive performance of increasingly complex black-box models. However, these predictive gains have come at the expense of losing the ability to interpret the relationships derived between…

An economics professor and an engineering professor were walking across campus.  The engineering professor spots something lying in the grass - “Look- here’s a $20 bill!”  The economist doesn’t bother to look.  “It can’t be - somebody would have picked it up.” This old joke…

It was 150 years ago when Darwin first used the term “evolution” in his writing (in his book The Descent of Man).  Two months ago, in The Normal Share of Paupers, I briefly discussed the unfortunate eugenics baggage that the discipline of statistics inherited from…

Died-in-the-wool software developers can get quite passionate about the relative virtues of one programming language or another, their debates sometimes threatening to transport you back to middle-school arguments about the greatest ballplayers of all time.  Though their computer passions find other outlets as well, data…

In late December, Statistics.com was acquired by Elder Research, Inc. Many of you have asked for more detail, so here’s an introduction to the folks at Elder Research and some stories of what they do.  There are 100+ employees at Elder Research, led by John…

Five years ago last month, the psychology journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology instigated a major debate in statistical circles when it said it would remove p-value citations from papers it published.  A year later, the American Statistical Association (ASA) released a statement on p-values…