Related papers: When Numbers Mislead Us
When statisticians quarrel about hypothesis testing, the debate usually focus on which method is the correct one. The fundamental question of whether we should test hypothesis at all tends to be forgotten. This lack of debate has its roots…
Dependence is undoubtedly a central concept in statistics. Though, it proves difficult to locate in the literature a formal definition which goes beyond the self-evident 'dependence = non-independence'. This absence has allowed the term…
Fair decisions require ignoring irrelevant, potentially biasing, information. To achieve this, decision-makers need to approximate what decision they would have made had they not known certain facts, such as the gender or race of a job…
We argue that while this discourse on data ethics is of critical importance, it is missing one fundamental point: If more and more efforts in business, government, science, and our daily lives are data-driven, we should pay more attention…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
Curiously overlooked in physics is its dependence on the transmission of numbers. For example the transmission of numerical clock readings is implicit in the concept of a coordinate system. The transmission of numbers and other logical…
We consider the problem of assessing whether, in an individual case, there is a causal relationship between an observed exposure and a response variable. When data are available on similar individuals we may be able to estimate prospective…
The presence of latent variables can greatly complicate inferences about causal relations between measured variables from statistical data. In many cases, the presence of latent variables makes it impossible to determine for two measured…
Automatic unreliable news detection is a research problem with great potential impact. Recently, several papers have shown promising results on large-scale news datasets with models that only use the article itself without resorting to any…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
This paper analyzes the working or default assumptions researchers in the formal, statistical, and case study traditions typically hold regarding the sources of unexplained variance, the meaning of outliers, parameter values, human…
Preprocessing forms an oft-neglected foundation for a wide range of statistical and scientific analyses. However, it is rife with subtleties and pitfalls. Decisions made in preprocessing constrain all later analyses and are typically…
A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…
In human consciousness perceptions are distinct or atomistic events despite being perceived by an apparently undivided inner observer. This paper applies both classical (Boolean) and quantum logic to analysis of the Liar paradox which is…
This paper deals with three traditional ways of defining contextuality: (C1) in terms of (non)existence of certain joint distributions involving measurements made in several mutually exclusive contexts; (C2) in terms of relationship between…
Measurement outcomes provide data for a physical theory. Unless they are objective they support no objective scientific knowledge. So the outcome of a quantum measurement must be an objective physical fact. But recent arguments purport to…
Despite their impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks, modern language models remain susceptible to distribution shifts, exhibiting brittle behavior when evaluated on data that differs in distribution from their training data. In…
Properties of weighted averages are studied for the general case that the individual measurements are subject to hidden correlations and have asymmetric statistical as well as systematic errors. Explicit expressions are derived for an…
The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This effect was first observed during the 1982…
Measurements play a crucial role in doing physics: Their results provide the basis on which we adopt or reject physical theories. In this note, we examine the effect of subjecting measurements themselves to our experience. We require that…