Sunday, January 9, 2011

Inference - "Significant"

Statistical Inference is all about using and applying the language of probability to say how trustworthy are you on the conclusions you make out of your data. When we talk about inferring from the data we naturally talk about the significance level. How significant is a claim on to the true side of a proposition? The simple idea is an outcome that would rarely happen if a claim were true is good evidence that the claim is not true.

"Significant" therefore in statistical sense necessarily does not mean how "important". It just simply means "not likely to happen just by chance" represented by an alpha  makes "not likely" more exact.

Now what kind of weird logic is that...LOL

Cigarette companies in their advertising campaigns have an internal rule that if they show a woman model smoking she needs to be of an average age of 25, realistically its always been lower than 25 as revealed by a famous statistic experiment through tests of Significance. I find this interesting. Was just discussing this that you can have knowledge of all statistics and formulas but its application to make sense in the real world is one of the forms of Godly Wisdom.

Thoughts...

Sam Kurien

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