Andrew Sullivan links to Maureen O'Connor (link) who picked up on Netflix's recent advertising pitch mischievously titled "Netflix adultery". Andrew highlighted this statistical result, with Maureen's interpretation, supposedly sourced from Netflix although I wasn't able to find the actual study. (I added the emphasis.) In a study of 2000 American adults, 12 percent confessed to watching ahead on TV shows they were supposed to save to watch with their partners.…
Medical researchers are somehow allowed to get away with statistical murder. It upsets me to read the article in Forbes titled "Pet Owners May Have Lower Risk For Heart Disease." (link) This article takes the form of many other similar articles that purport to find an association between some risk factor and a common disease. Note they always use the weasel word "may". If you see this word, and immediately…
On the Junk Charts blog (link), I discussed some charts from the NYT graphics team (@nytgraphics) for a feature on the NFL draft. In the second part of the behind-the-scenes blog post, they discussed how they visualized work by some economists. This is how the research was summarized: "across all players and positions, teams only picked a player better than the person who went next at that position 52 percent…
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 answer a question. Once you [...] Related posts: Statistics to English Translation, Part 2a: ’Significant’ Doesn’t Always Mean ’Important’ Worry…
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 P < 0.01 for linear [...] Related posts: Level fit summaries can be tricky in R How to test XCOM…
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 question in designing opinion polls [...] Related posts: What is a large enough random sample? Level fit summaries can be…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
