Questions tagged [statistics]
For questions about the science that deals with classification, analysis and interpretation of numerical facts and data.
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Are statistics racist?
Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is a proposition and an area of study of medicine for which I am very fond. However, a few days ago, talking to some friends, I was confronted with a very critical ...
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Why some calculations noted as "sym^2" and "sym", while others noted as "symA" and "symB", where "symB" is the square root of "symA"?
Today I learnt that the standard deviation is calculated as square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution. The mean of the squares of the ...
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Why was the term random "variable" applied to a mapping?
I think I'm correct in saying a random variable is a mapping from the sample space to the real line (or more generally to $\mathbb{R}^n$. If I'm right then random variable seems a very odd way for a ...
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Who said that math or statistics is not free from class interest?
I'm not 100% sure this is the right site for this question, but here it goes.
An already dead professor said in a lecture that Stalin (or perhaps another communist leader) wrote once something along ...
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Did Egon Pearson have a PhD?
Did the statistician Egon Pearson have a PhD? If not, to what extent did he write a dissertation?
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Who was the first person to propose the idea that consciousness arises from complexity?
The origin of consciousness has been a major scientific and philosophic debate since ever. Sometimes the origin is considered a philosophical issue, while others consider it a physics issue.
Most ...
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Where can I find the historical information or the stats related to Winning WW2 with the minimum actions using The Bombe Machine of Alan Turing?
I am doing a marathon of data visualizations with real world datasets. I am interested in historical war datasets.
Does anybody know about the historical data on The Bombe Machine cracking the codes ...
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Markov chains origins and how is Christianity involved
In a book called Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, page 405, the first instance of "Markov process" is accompanied by a footnote which reads
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John Cataldo
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In which work was Gibbs' Inequality introduced?
Gibbs' inequality
$$-\sum\limits_{i=1}^n p_{i} \cdot \log{p_{i}} \le -\sum\limits_{i=1}^n p_{i} \cdot \log{q_{i}}$$
is such a popular thing that I cannot find where it was introduced.
My findings
I ...
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How long have people been debunking the P value (statistical significance) as commonly used in the human sciences: medicine, psychology and so on?
I have been puzzled for a long time at the way psychologists and medical researchers state that they have 'significant' results, and at the way this statement is relayed to the public who are misled ...
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Examples of when statistical distributions like Binomial or Normal distribution was critical in a law/policy decision, in a court case or otherwise
This was closed as off-topic on math.se, and it was suggested I post this here, so here goes.
Firstly, I am aware that this thread exists, and I'll definitely be ordering a copy of the book, "...
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Stories about the consequences of statistical simplification?
I am currently preparing a presentation about the value of more complex (specically: non-Gaussian) statistical inference. I thought it might be interesting to start the presentation with a small real-...
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Where was statistics taught in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Here is a fragment from Anders Hald's A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750:
The original meaning of statistics is thus a collection of facts of interest to a ...
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Why is William Playfair seldom heard about in mathematics?
William Playfair was a Scottish engineer and economist, who invented the pie and bar charts as well as the line graph, which have all played an indubitably ubiquitous role in modern statistics.
I hadn'...
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How was mathematics used in World War II to "act on the right amount of intelligence"?
In the movie "The Imitation Game", Alan Turing along with his team crack the German encryption machine Enigma but advises his superiors to not act on all decrypted intelligence, as that might lead to ...
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