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Why I Don't Automatically Reach for Machine Learning
Machine learning is often treated as the default destination of a data project. I prefer the opposite order: understand the problem, write down the structure...
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Confidence Sets Are Not Just Intervals
A 95% confidence set is whatever a test fails to reject, and nothing makes that an interval. One small model gives an empty set, two, three or four pieces as...
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Proxy Metrics Under Optimisation: Why a Correlation of 0.6 Is Not a Substitute for the Goal
The proxy correlates 0.63 with the metric that matters, so the team optimises it and reports a gain of 3.8. The goal metric moved by 1.9. Change one thing, m...
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What Makes Statistical Software Trustworthy?
Statistical software can pass ordinary unit tests and still fail scientifically. The most dangerous bugs often return plausible numbers. Trust comes from tes...
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Week Over Week: A Comparison That Moves Five Percent on Its Own
Today against the same day last week moved 6 percent, so the channel gets investigated. On a metric where nothing has changed at all, that comparison has a s...
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Berkson's Paradox: How Selecting the Cases Worth Looking At Invents Correlations
Among escalated tickets, severity and customer value are correlated at minus 0.55. Across all tickets they are independent. Nothing about the tickets changed...
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When “Science-Based” Becomes a Brand
“Science-based” can describe a method, or it can function as a brand identity. The distinction is whether claims remain proportionate to evidence, open to co...
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A Negative Monte Carlo Result Is Still a Result
A simulation that refuses to confirm the theory you hoped to see is not a failed simulation. It may be the most useful part of the project. The difficult par...
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Silent Failures: When the Pipeline Changes and the Metric Moves
The average order value fell two percent overnight and three teams spent a day looking for the cause. Nothing about customers changed. The enrichment service...
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Visceral Fat: Measurement, Risk and the Claims Social Media Overstates
Visceral adipose tissue is clinically relevant, but much of the discussion around it confuses the biological quantity with the proxies used to estimate it. W...
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