Statistical Thinking

Anticipating your friendly statistician’s top 5 objections

Cassie Kozyrkov

7 min read

·

Sep 22, 2018

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If you’re new to the role the concept of population plays in statistics, skim my intro to set the mood. Long story short:

• You only get to glimpse your population through the incomplete keyhole that is your sample — dealing with that is what all those fancy calculations are for.
• The population is whatever the decision-maker chooses to interest themselves in for the purpose of making this decision.
• In a machine learning / AI setting, the population is usually defined in terms of the instances the system needs to work on.

So the decision-maker gets to pick any population definition they want, even if it sounds stupid? Would now be a really good time for the statistician in you to get angry? (That’s our secret, Captain: we’re always angry.)

Let’s raise some valid objections together, shall we?

Your friendly statistician’s objections

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Objection 1: This isn’t what the decision-maker is interested in.