This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Everything that can go wrong with a time series analysis has gone wrong with the post […]
Randomness And The “Null” Hypothesis
Last week of teaching! Randomness is not a cause. Neither is chance. It is always a mistake to say things like “explainable by chance”, “random change”, “the differences are random”, “unlikely to […]
It’s World Statistics Day! Death To P-Values, Hypothesis Tests, And False Ascriptions Of Cause! #StatsDay15
Who said the UN doesn’t do anything useful? Courtesy of that august body, it’s World Statistics Day! Official statistics help decision makers develop informed policies that impact millions of people. Improved data […]
The Mysticism Of Simulations: Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Sampling, And Their Alternatives
Introit Ever heard of somebody “simulating” normal “random” or “stochastic” variables, or perhaps “drawing” from a normal or some other distribution? Such things form the backbone of many statistical methods, including bootstrapping, […]
The Philosophy Of Rock Paper Scissors
Way my dad and I used to play is that when somebody won they got to grab the hand of the loser and then, with the fore- and middle-fingers only, slap the […]
Evolution Under Fixed Constraints; Or, Why Random Changes Don’t Cut It
See if this analogy makes sense. A ramp onto which you loose a ball, which can roll down and fall into one of three slots. The configuration is such that the ball […]
On Nate Silver’s Predictions: Which Side Of The Probability Equation Are We On?
When I checked FiveThirtyEight.com’s Senate prediction, it said “Republicans have a 72.3% chance of winning a majority.” There were also words that the “probability that each party will win control of the […]
Yet Another Author Claims Statistically Significant Temperature Change. 99.999%!
Update 6 Sep 2014 Yet another another another study has claimed “statistical significance”, this one by Philip Kokica, Steven Crimpc, and Mark Howdend. “A probabilistic analysis of human influence on recent record […]
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