With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Stats

The Dangers of Correlation and the Necessity of Scatterplots

The Dangers of Correlation and the Necessity of Scatterplots

After my previous post on IQ and Height, I thought it would be good to revisit the subjects of scatterplots and correlation. A scatterplot is often an excellent first step in any data analysis. You can learn a lot from a scatterplot, because humans are good at pattern recognition. A

IQ and Height

I got a message from my first college roommate last month, asking about a Wikipedia article: Height and Intelligence. He wanted to know what it means to say that there is a 0.2 correlation between height and intelligence. That is an excellent question. I meant to get to this

Taguchi Genichi

In my statistics class at work we talked about Taguchi Genichi (田口玄一) recently. Taguchi developed methods for applying statistics to the quality of manufactured goods. This is something the Japanese are very good at, but little appreciated is the fact that is this due to the influence of an

Hypothesis Testing

Classical statistics following the work of R. A. Fisher relies heavily upon randomization to cover a multitude of sins. This was heavily emphasized in my graduate statistics classes, but only reading Statistics for Experimenters do I come to appreciate this position more fully. R. A. Fisher was an experimentalist himself,

Voodoo Science

Jerry Pournelle wrote a piece many years ago called "The Voodoo Sciences". He was first and foremost concerned with defaming economics, a task that is now completed. However, he also included many of the social sciences in his definition. I thought the essay was interesting, but I think

Videogames and correlation

I actually finished Chapter 4 and half of Chapter 5 of Box, Hunter and Hunter today. I'm in a little bit of hurry because I am going to be sitting in on the company statistics training class starting next week, so I want to be fresh on the

Chapter 3 of BHH

I worked my way through Chapter 3 of Box, Hunter, and Hunter. Also a good chapter, this chapter was all about the assumptions that are absolutely required by classical statistics, but also about what to do when you can't meet those assumptions. There is a nice table comparing