Questions related to statistics in the media (TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, etc.)
Questions tagged [statistics-in-media]
18 questions
190
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How exactly does one “control for other variables”?
Here is the article that motivated this question: Does impatience make us fat?
I liked this article, and it nicely demonstrates the concept of “controlling for other variables” (IQ, career, income, age, etc) in order to best isolate the true…
JackOfAll
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Why law of large numbers does not apply in the case of Apple share price?
Here is the article in NY times called "Apple confronts the law of large numbers". It tries to explain Apple share price rise using law of large numbers. What statistical (or mathematical) errors does this article make?
mpiktas
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Equations in the news: Translating a multi-level model to a general audience
The New York Times has a long comment on the 'value-added' teacher evaluation system being used to give feedback to New York City educators. The lede is the equation used to calculate the scores - presented without context. The rhetorical strategy…
Andrew
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Article about misuse of statistical method in NYTimes
I am referring to this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html
Consider the following experiment. Suppose there was reason to believe that a coin was slightly weighted toward heads. In a test, the coin comes up heads 527 times…
vonjd
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Why are The Simpsons (TV series) so apparently successful in "predicting" the future?
It has been widely commented in the yellow and not so yellow press that The Simpsons (the TV series) have repeatedly predicted the future. Comprehensive online articles about it are here and here. If you google "simpsons predict the future" you get…
luchonacho
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Does this NYT article incorrectly assume independent increments?
The article plots for every 100 women that use a certain type of contraception method the number of unplanned pregnancies over time.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sunday-review/unplanned-pregnancies.html?_r=0
In particular at the…
user103341
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How should this BBC chart (Brexit correlation between education and results) have been drawn?
The BBC has analyzed more Brexit referendum data; the first chart in their article caught my eye:
It seemed strange to split the x-axis at 50%. Surely this should have been split at the median of the data? (Or the mean if the data was normally…
Darren Cook
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The Mediterranean diet - statistics issues with the updated paper
In 2013, a group of researchers published a paper with results on a randomized trial of the Mediterranean diet, finding that it appears to have significant health benefits. Today, they retracted their original paper because of statistical errors…
D.W.
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Statistical language in "The Avengers"
In the Marvel Movie "The Avengers," there's a scene in which Bruce Banner, looking for a piece of alien technology called the "tesseract," says that he is going to "rough out a tracking algorithm, just a basic cluster recognition." Is this a…
user135912
6
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4 answers
How to interpret the margin of error in a poll?
Recently the media reported on a political poll that stated that "46% of Republican voters in Mississippi think that interracial marriage should be illegal". One example story (of many around the 'net) is this one from the NY Daily News:…
Peter M
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Was Amazon's AI tool, more than human recruiters, biased against women?
A typical example how bias in data is being copied by AI is Amazon's recruiting tool that got abandoned in 2018.
In the various reports it is implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) stated that the AI magnified the bias that was present in the…
Sextus Empiricus
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4
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Coding a variable in regression that decays and goes negative and then to zero
In marketing analytics, there is a concept of adstock link
that captures through a variable transformation, the decaying impact of an advertising stimulus on demand. Finding the optimal adstock rate is typically done through non-linear least squares…
B_Miner
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3
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Modeling a Time-Series Variable as a Function of Another
I'm pursuing an academic research project aiming to look at the effects of news coverage on a company's stock price. In order to do so, I hope to index coverage of an event into a single time-series variable tracking coverage across the time…
Jason
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A new strain of covid-19 is 70% more infectious/transmissible. What does that mean and how has it been estimated/measured?
70% in the media
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9070683
Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a Downing Street briefing that early analysis showed the new strain could increase the reproductive rate by 0.4 or more and that it may be up to 70%…
Sextus Empiricus
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How to calculate advertising copy wearout using kalman filter?
I have to calculate half life of an advertisement using Kalman filter in R. The paper 'Estimating the Half-life of Advertisements' (Naik, 1999[1]) provides the base but am unable to understand how exactly the estimation is being done and since a lot…
Bala
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