Quotes About Analysis

The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour. Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.

he child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a small child absorbs form and colour. Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

presented in an honest and straightforward manner. A little mathematical sophistication—and a little practice—allows you to recognize errors of randumbness, causuistry, and regression to the moon; once you get used to spotting phony patterns and false connections, you'll begin to see them everywhere.

All polynomials of degree n-those that have a leading term of x^n- split into n distinct terms. This is the fundamental theorem of algebra.

As a rule of thumb, the sample size must be at least 30 for the central limit theorem to hold true.) This

Data are to statistics what a good offensive is to a star quarterback.

Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research.

The credit card companies are at the forefront of this kind of analysis, both because they are privy to so much data on our spending habits and because their business model depends so heavily on finding customers who are just barely a good credit risk.

So we simplify. We perform calculations that reduce a complex array of data into a handful of numbers that describe those data

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

The mean, or average, turns out to have some problems in that regard, namely, that it is prone to distortion by "outliers," which are observations that lie farther from the center.

we have another statistic that also signals the "middle" of a distribution, albeit differently: the median.

For distributions without serious outliers, the median and the mean will be similar.

As former Fed governor Kevin Warsh has said, "Economics, and the conduct of monetary policy, after all, is not physics.

One fundamental difference between a poll and other forms of sampling is that the sample statistic we care about will be not a mean (e.g., 187 pounds) but rather a percentage or proportion

The standard deviation is the descriptive statistic that allows us to assign a single number to this dispersion around the mean.

Skepticism is always a good first response.

Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.

Regression analysis enables us to go one step further and "fit a line" that best describes a linear relationship between the two variables.

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

our ability to analyze data has grown far more sophisticated than our thinking about what we ought to do with the results. You

The challenge with any "before and after" kind of analysis is that just because one thing follows another does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two.