{"id":29460,"date":"2022-11-10T20:39:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-11T04:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=29460"},"modified":"2022-11-10T20:39:26","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T04:39:26","slug":"statistically-significant-or-completely-irrelevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/statistically-significant-or-completely-irrelevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Statistically significant or completely irrelevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever heard the phrase that 99 % of statistics are made up? The joke is that you can throw any number you want in there because numbers hold no relevancy in statistics. I’m not saying that generalization is accurate, but I do wonder if that phrase came about because the mainstream population didn’t understand the intricate and tangled web that statistics exhibit. In today’s media, statistically significant could mean completely irrelevant: you be the judge. I thought that I would give you two examples here with made up news articles headlines by yours truly. One story however is based on factual events.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cChanging the temperature of your food could improve your health.\u201d\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

WHOA! That sounds like a home run! Sure if changing the temperature of my food would improve my health why wouldn’t I do it? The reality of the study when you get down to it suggested that in actuality changing the temperature of your food allowed your digestive tract to work at a rate of one minute faster over the course of one year than if you consume at standard food temperatures which in turn does better your health because your body saves one minute of digesting its food. Does that tell us anything though? After looking at the statistical analysis of the study would you change your eating habits after getting the full story? Do we care that our food can be digested one min faster over the course of one year? Does that make or break our daily life? The reality is that most likely it is completely irrelevant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAdding in one exercise per week could win you a state championship.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

Last week in Texas we had state cross country meets and a local girl won first out of the entire state for the third year in a row. The community has been so excited for her. In a non hypothetical analysis her time was one min faster than last year when she won it. What changed? I called her aunt to see if she could identify a single component that put her over the top this year to be able to beat her existing state record by one min and she stated that she is constantly pushing herself all year to train for this event. She never takes a break. This year she decided to add in 1 additional strength training session per week.\u00a0 That one session a week contributed to shaving 1 min off of her time to take home a third state championship. This alone is the epitome of statistical significance described in a contributive manner. We can’t prove that adding in that one additional strength training helped. It could have been maturity of her body or emotional preparedness as she continues to run the same race. We also cant prove that adding it in didn’t allow her body that extra boost for her to win the state championship again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Frederick Mosteller once said,\u00a0 \u201cWhile it’s easy to lie with statistics, it’s even easier to lie without them.\u201d (1) This brings us to Simpson’s Paradox. The idea as a whole is perhaps my biggest excitement of reading this particular book this week. Which I might add I could not put down this title. I did not follow the assignment and only read a portion and on occasion I believe thats ok. In my opinion this particular work by the Chivers family required you to read it in its entirety to understand the content fully.\u00a0 I was reminded this week how exiting statistical analysis can be. I’m curious to continue my research on how numbers that are so definitive both have a personality of their own and are completely misleading. \"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The following graph to the left (2) is a great pictorial example of what Simpson’s Paradox might look like with the same set of data. On the far left with blue and orange it shows two separate groups with a positive correlation between x and y. However on the right when you combine the groups into one collective number the data then shifts and becomes a negative outcome.<\/p>\n

As my final note I really appreciated the optional boxes the authors included to hone in on specific mathematical concepts. While I did get an A in my last statistics class,\u00a0 that may or may not have been eighteen years ago. The ability to quickly re-grasp a concept is both appreciated and necessary to understand the book as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

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(1) <\/span>Chivers, Tom, and David Chivers. \u201cHow Numbers Can Mislead.\u201d Essay. In How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)<\/i>, 7\u20137. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022.<\/p>\n

(2) \u201cSimpson\u2019s Paradox and Interpreting Data.\u201d Accessed November 11, 2022. https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/simpsons-paradox-and-interpreting-data-6a0443516765.<\/p>\n

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Have you ever heard the phrase that 99 % of statistics are made up? The joke is that you can throw any number you want in there because numbers hold no relevancy in statistics. I’m not saying that generalization is accurate, but I do wonder if that phrase came about because the mainstream population didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":158,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2347,2076],"class_list":["post-29460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp01","tag-chivers","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/158"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29460"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29490,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460\/revisions\/29490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}