Charles Wheelan

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

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A New York Times bestseller
“Brilliant, funny…the best math teacher you never had.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.

For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.

And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
This book is currently unavailable
439 printed pages
Original publication
2013
Publication year
2013
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Quotes

  • Soliloquios Literarioshas quotedlast year
    And it is not merely a hypothetical case. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later.3 Gould subsequently wrote a famous article called “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he argued that his scientific knowledge of statistics saved him from the erroneous conclusion that he would necessarily be dead in eight months. The definition of the median tells us that half the patients will live at least eight months—and possibly much, much longer than that. The mortality distribution is “right-skewed,” which is more than a technicality if you happen to have the disease.4
  • Soliloquios Literarioshas quotedlast year
    Stick with me; it’s not that complicated. Suppose that the mean height in the sample is 66 inches (with a standard deviation of 5 inches) and that the mean weight is 177 pounds (with a standard deviation of 10 pounds). Now suppose that you are 72 inches tall and weigh 168 pounds. We can also say that you your height is 1.2 standard deviations above the mean in height [(72 – 66)/5)] and .9 standard deviations below the mean in weight, or –0.9 for purposes of the formula [(168 – 177)/10]. Yes, it’s unusual for someone to be above the mean in height and below the mean in weight, but since you’ve paid good money for this book, I figured I should at least make you tall and thin. Notice that your height and weight, formerly in inches and pounds, have been reduced to 1.2 and –0.9. This is what makes the units go away.
  • Soliloquios Literarioshas quotedlast year
    Correlation measures the degree to which two phenomena are related to one another. For example, there is a correlation between summer temperatures and ice cream sales. When one goes up, so does the other. Two variables are positively correlated if a change in one is associated with a change in the other in the same direction, such as the relationship between height and weight. Taller people weigh more (on average); shorter people weigh less. A correlation is negative if a positive change in one variable is associated with a negative change in the other, such as the relationship between exercise and weight.

    The tricky thing about these kinds of associations is that not every observation fits the pattern. Sometimes short people weigh more than tall people. Sometimes people who don’t exercise are skinnier than people who exercise all the time. Still, there is a meaningful relationship between height and weight, and between exercise and weight.

    If we were to do a scatter plot of the heights and weights of a random sample of American adults, we would expect to see something like the following:

    Scatter Plot for Height and Weight

    If we were to create a scatter plot of the association between exercise (as measured by minutes of intensive exercise per week) and weight, we would expect a negative correlation, with those who exercise more tending to weigh less. But a pattern consisting of dots scattered across the page is a somewhat unwieldy tool. (If Netflix tried to make film recommendations for me by plotting the ratings for thousands of films by millions of customers, the results would bury the headquarters in scatter plots.) Instead, the power of correlation as a statistical tool is that we can encapsulate an association between two variables in a single descriptive statistic: the correlation coefficient.

    The correlation coefficient has two fabulously attractive characteristics. First, for math reasons that have been relegated to the appendix, it is a single number ranging from –1 to 1. A correlation of 1, often described as perfect correlation, means that every change in one variable is associated with an equivalent change in the other variable in the same direction.

    A correlation of –1, or perfect negative correlation, means that every change in one variable is associated with an equivalent change in the other variable in the opposite direction.

    The closer the correlation is to 1 or –1, the stronger the association. A correlation of 0 (or close to it) means that the variables have no meaningful association with one an‍

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