Statistics is the science of changing your mind. | Shreya

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Shreya
Oct 12, 2022

Statistics is the science of changing your mind.

Making decisions based on facts (parameters) is hard enough as it is, but -curses!- sometimes we don’t even have the facts we need. Instead, what we know (our sample) is different from what we wish we knew (our population). That’s what it means to have uncertainty.

Here is the statistics jargon cheatsheet...

- Bayesians change their mind about beliefs.

- Frequentists change their mind about actions.

- Hypotheses are descriptions of what the world might look like.

- Testing in a nutshell: “Does our evidence make the null hypothesis look ridiculous?”

- The p-value on the periodic table: it’s the element of surprise.

- Only change your mind if the confidence interval doesn’t overlap with your null hypothesis.

- The math is all about building a toy model of the null hypothesis universe. That’s how you get the p-value.

- Use power analysis to check that you budgeted for enough data before you begin.

- Uncertainty means you can come to the wrong conclusion, even if you have the best math in the world.

- Type I error is changing your mind when you shouldn’t.

- Type II error is NOT changing your mind when you should.

More data means more protection against coming to the wrong conclusion.