All Questions

139,033 questions
532k views

Making sense of principal component analysis, eigenvectors & eigenvalues

In today's pattern recognition class my professor talked about PCA, eigenvectors and eigenvalues. I understood the mathematics of it. If I'm asked to find eigenvalues etc. I'll do it correctly like ...
528k views

How to choose the number of hidden layers and nodes in a feedforward neural network?

Is there a standard and accepted method for selecting the number of layers, and the number of nodes in each layer, in a feed-forward neural network? I'm interested in automated ways of building neural ...
269k views

What is the difference between “likelihood” and “probability”?

The wikipedia page claims that likelihood and probability are distinct concepts. In non-technical parlance, "likelihood" is usually a synonym for "probability," but in statistical usage there is a ...
160k views

What is the intuition behind beta distribution?

Disclaimer: I'm not a statistician but a software engineer. Most of my knowledge in statistics comes from self-education, thus I still have many gaps in understanding concepts that may seem trivial ...
144k views

The Two Cultures: statistics vs. machine learning?

Last year, I read a blog post from Brendan O'Connor entitled "Statistics vs. Machine Learning, fight!" that discussed some of the differences between the two fields. Andrew Gelman responded favorably ...
460k views

What is the difference between test set and validation set?

I found this confusing when I use the neural network toolbox in Matlab. It divided the raw data set into three parts: training set validation set test set I notice in many training or learning ...
192k views

Why square the difference instead of taking the absolute value in standard deviation?

In the definition of standard deviation, why do we have to square the difference from the mean to get the mean (E) and take the square root back at the end? Can't we just simply take the absolute ...
129k views

Python as a statistics workbench

Lots of people use a main tool like Excel or another spreadsheet, SPSS, Stata, or R for their statistics needs. They might turn to some specific package for very special needs, but a lot of things can ...
107k views

How to understand the drawbacks of K-means

K-means is a widely used method in cluster analysis. In my understanding, this method does NOT require ANY assumptions, i.e., give me a dataset and a pre-specified number of clusters, k, and I just ...
157k views

What is your favorite “data analysis” cartoon?

This is one of my favorites: One entry per answer. (This is in the vein of the Stack Overflow question What’s your favorite “programmer” cartoon?.) P.S. Do not hotlink the cartoon without the site's ...
191k views

Bayesian and frequentist reasoning in plain English

How would you describe in plain English the characteristics that distinguish Bayesian from Frequentist reasoning?
200k views

Relationship between SVD and PCA. How to use SVD to perform PCA?

Principal component analysis (PCA) is usually explained via an eigen-decomposition of the covariance matrix. However, it can also be performed via singular value decomposition (SVD) of the data matrix ...
138k views

Explaining to laypeople why bootstrapping works

I recently used bootstrapping to estimate confidence intervals for a project. Someone who doesn't know much about statistics recently asked me to explain why bootstrapping works, i.e., why is it that ...
102k views

159k views

What does the hidden layer in a neural network compute?

I'm sure many people will respond with links to 'let me google that for you', so I want to say that I've tried to figure this out so please forgive my lack of understanding here, but I cannot figure ...
607k views

How to summarize data by group in R? [closed]

I have R data frame like this: ...
17k views

What is a data scientist?

Having recently graduated from my PhD program in statistics, I had for the last couple of months began searching for work in the field of statistics. Almost every company I considered had a job ...
241k views

How to interpret a QQ plot

I am working with a small dataset (21 observations) and have the following normal QQ plot in R: Seeing that the plot does not support normality, what could I infer about the underlying distribution? ...
32k views

Why the sudden fascination with tensors?

I've noticed lately that a lot of people are developing tensor equivalents of many methods (tensor factorization, tensor kernels, tensors for topic modeling, etc) I'm wondering, why is the world ...
202k views

Statistics Jokes

Well, we've got favourite statistics quotes. What about statistics jokes?
115k views

When should I use lasso vs ridge?

Say I want to estimate a large number of parameters, and I want to penalize some of them because I believe they should have little effect compared to the others. How do I decide what penalization ...