Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Heteroskedacity

I put that word in the title because it is one of the few technical terms in statistics which does not have meaning in everyday language.

I have always felt that statistics (& statisticians) suffer such a poor public image because, in part at least, their words do not mean what everybody thinks they mean

In the theory & practice of statistics:

Average does not mean most

Error does not mean you did your sums wrong

A random sample is not one drawn from any group of people or objects who happen to be conveniently to hand

And significant does not mean big, important, or even noteworthy


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