Questions tagged [statistics-in-media]
Questions related to statistics in the media (TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, etc.)
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Modeling a Time-Series Variable as a Function of Another
I'm pursuing an academic research project aiming to look at the effects of news coverage on a company's stock price. In order to do so, I hope to index coverage of an event into a single time-series ...
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A new strain of covid-19 is 70% more infectious/transmissible. What does that mean and how has it been estimated/measured? [closed]
70% in the media
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9070683
Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a Downing Street briefing that early analysis showed the new strain could increase the reproductive ...
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Was Amazon's AI tool, more than human recruiters, biased against women?
A typical example how bias in data is being copied by AI is Amazon's recruiting tool that got abandoned in 2018.
In the various reports it is implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) stated that the AI ...
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4
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Coding a variable in regression that decays and goes negative and then to zero
In marketing analytics, there is a concept of adstock link
that captures through a variable transformation, the decaying impact of an advertising stimulus on demand. Finding the optimal adstock rate ...
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Why are The Simpsons (TV series) so apparently successful in "predicting" the future? [closed]
It has been widely commented in the yellow and not so yellow press that The Simpsons (the TV series) have repeatedly predicted the future. Comprehensive online articles about it are here and here. If ...
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The Mediterranean diet - statistics issues with the updated paper
In 2013, a group of researchers published a paper with results on a randomized trial of the Mediterranean diet, finding that it appears to have significant health benefits. Today, they retracted ...
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Royal Statistical Scociety Statistic of the Year - comparing lawn mower deaths with terror acts
I was reading an article on the RSS website where they discussed some top statistics of 2017. One of them was an apparently viral tweet from Kim Kardashian that compares deaths from lawn mower ...
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Regression / Probability should give one number!
This may be a strange question. I work as a data scientist for a Media company. My job revolves around predicting the expected "Reach" and number of views an ad will have based on mining historical ...
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Does this NYT article incorrectly assume independent increments?
The article plots for every 100 women that use a certain type of contraception method the number of unplanned pregnancies over time.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sunday-review/...
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Statistical language in "The Avengers"
In the Marvel Movie "The Avengers," there's a scene in which Bruce Banner, looking for a piece of alien technology called the "tesseract," says that he is going to "rough out ...
user135912
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How should this BBC chart (Brexit correlation between education and results) have been drawn?
The BBC has analyzed more Brexit referendum data; the first chart in their article caught my eye:
It seemed strange to split the x-axis at 50%. Surely this should have been split at the median of the ...
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2
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How to calculate advertising copy wearout using kalman filter?
I have to calculate half life of an advertisement using Kalman filter in R. The paper 'Estimating the Half-life of Advertisements' (Naik, 1999[1]) provides the base but am unable to understand how ...
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Examples for teaching: Sometimes we CAN infer causality.
There have been threads here before which posted links of the media attributing causality to correlational studies, and links to those studies have been posted. It seems as if we are always focusing ...
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Why law of large numbers does not apply in the case of Apple share price?
Here is the article in NY times called "Apple confronts the law of large numbers". It tries to explain Apple share price rise using law of large numbers. What statistical (or mathematical) errors does ...
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How exactly does one “control for other variables”?
Here is the article that motivated this question: Does impatience make us fat?
I liked this article, and it nicely demonstrates the concept of “controlling for other variables” (IQ, career, income, ...
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How to interpret the margin of error in a poll?
Recently the media reported on a political poll that stated that "46% of Republican voters in Mississippi think that interracial marriage should be illegal". One example story (of many around the '...
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Equations in the news: Translating a multi-level model to a general audience
The New York Times has a long comment on the 'value-added' teacher evaluation system being used to give feedback to New York City educators. The lede is the equation used to calculate the scores - ...
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Article about misuse of statistical method in NYTimes
I am referring to this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html
Consider the following experiment. Suppose there was reason to believe that a coin was slightly weighted toward ...
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