This book is about turning data into knowledge. Data is cheap (at least relatively); knowledge is harder to come by. I will present three related pieces:<\/p>\n
The thesis of this book is that if you know how to program, you can use that skill to help you understand probability and statistics. These topics are often presented from a mathematical perspective, and that approach works well for some people. But some important ideas in this area are hard to work with mathematically and relatively easy to approach computationally.<\/p>\n
The rest of this chapter presents a case study motivated by a question I heard when my wife and I were expecting our first child: do first babies tend to arrive late?<\/p>\n
1.1 Do first babies arrive late?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
If you Google<\/a> this question, you will find plenty of discussion. Some people claim it\u2019s true, others say it\u2019s a myth, and some people say it\u2019s the other way around: first babies come early.<\/p>\n In many of these discussions, people provide data to support their claims. I found many examples like these:<\/p>\n \u201cMy two friends that have given birth recently to their first babies, BOTH went almost 2 weeks overdue before going into labour or being induced.\u201d Reports like these are called\u00a0anecdotal evidence\u00a0<\/b>because they are based on data that is unpublished and usually personal. In casual conversation, there is nothing wrong with anecdotes, so I don\u2019t mean to pick on the people I quoted.<\/p>\n But we might want evidence that is more persuasive and an answer that is more reliable. By those standards, anecdotal evidence usually fails, because:<\/p>\n So how can we do better?<\/p>\n 1.2 A statistical approach\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n To address the limitations of anecdotes, we will use the tools of statistics, which include:<\/p>\n By performing these steps with care to avoid pitfalls, we can reach conclusions that are more justifiable and more likely to be correct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\u201cMy first one came 2 weeks late and now I think the second one is going to come out two weeks early!!\u201d
\n\u201cI don\u2019t think that can be true because my sister was my mother\u2019s first and she was early, as with many of my cousins.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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