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Gaurav

https://gsood.com

Why Were the Polls so Accurate?

The Quant. Interwebs have overflowed with joy since the election. Poll aggregation works. And so indeed does polling, though you won’t hear as much about it on the news, which is likely biased towards celebrity intellects rather than the hardworking many. But why were the polls so accurate? One

Raising Money for Causes

Four teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood and eminently well-to-do, were out on the pavement raising money for children struck with cancer. They had been out raising money for a couple of hours, and from a glance at their tin pot, I estimated that they had raised about $30 or

Sample This

What do single shot evaluations of MT (replace it with anything else) samples (vis-a-vis census figures) tell us? I am afraid very little. Inference rests upon knowledge of the data (here – respondent) generating process. Without a model of the data generating process, all such research reverts to modest tautology – sample

Representativeness Heuristic, Base Rates, and Bayes

From the Introduction of their edited volume: Tversky and Kahneman used the following experiment for testing the ‘representativeness heuristic’ – Subjects are shown a brief personality description of several individuals, sampled at random from 100 professionals – engineers and lawyers. Subjects are asked to assess whether the description is of an engineer

Comparing Datasets and Reporting Only Non-Duplicated Rows

The following is in response to a question on the R-Help list. Consider two datasets: reported <- structure(list(Product = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 5L), .Label = c("Cocoa", "Coffee C", "GC", "Sugar No 11"