Posts tagged ‘statistics’
Baseball as an excuse for programming
October 5th, 2012 at 12:51 am by Dr. Drang
I find it really hard to watch baseball nowadays because the game moves so slowly, but I do still like to look at statistics and standings. The standings in Yahoo! Sports include a figure that was uncommon when I was a kid: the teams’ run differential, the difference their runs scored and runs given up.…
SciPy v. Octave - Round one
June 17th, 2012 at 10:55 pm by Dr. Drang
On Friday, while working out a sampling plan for a client, I needed to calculate the 95% one-sided lower confidence limits for binomial sampling with a small number of samples.1 I figured it’d be a good little project for comparing Octave, which I’ve been using for years, and SciPy, which I’ve been promising myself I’d…
The risk of sitting
April 11th, 2012 at 9:20 pm by Dr. Drang
Last week, everyone was blogging and tweeting about this New York Times article about the health effects of sitting for long periods every day. And I think everyone got it wrong. Let’s start with a disclaimer. Although I have both formal training and professional experience dealing with probability and statistics (it was part of my…
How many samples?
July 7th, 2010 at 8:30 am by Dr. Drang
In my Monte Carlo solution of the Two Child Problem, I did 10,000 simulations using Python’s random module. Was that enough? If I didn’t already know the answers (the usual case when doing Monte Carlo simulation), how could I estimate the accuracy of the results? Not surprisingly, the answers to these results can be found…
