Feeling Blue

In statistics, the acronym BLUE stands for Best Linear Unbiased Estimator. For a while I didn’t know this and wondered why the stats paper I was reading kept using capitalized colors to describe a regression.

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Social Sciences' Null Hypothesis Problem

Despite what academics might have you believe, science and especially social science has gotten increasingly political these days. It’s a pretty big problem that throws into question the validity of social science results.

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Conditioning on a Collider

I’m trying to come up with a cute, terse way to illustrate the phenomenon of conditioning on a collider and I’m actually having a hard time summarizing it. Mostly because I just read a rigorous academic paper discussing all the insiduous details of colliders, and I absolutely love rigor and details and want to tell you all about it! But I’ll suppress the urge. This is the cliff notes version. Enjoy.

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Guess My Weight

My height is in the 5th percentile for women my age. Which percentile do you think I’m in for weight?
a. 5th percentile
b. 10th percentile, so I should lose 5 pounds to get down to the 5th
c. 10th percentile, which is probably close to average for my height
d. A lady never tells

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The Curse of Dimensionality

Generalizing to higher dimensions is one area where mathematicians have usually excelled. While others fear what they cannot visualize, mathematicians bravely add another coordinate or change a two to a three and BOOM!

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Frequentism

I asked a friend to explain the difference between frequentism and bayesianism and he directed me to this very educational work of art:

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Universality of the Uniform

For any continuous random variable X, if we apply the cumulative distribution function (cdf) of X to X itself we obtain a uniform random variable on the interval [0,1].

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