November 7 UPDATE: click here to view our final update post where we give our latest analyses just a day before the election! Click here to go to our daily predictions page. In the first 10 posts I mostly concentrated on theoretical topics. But … [Continue reading]
Frequentist And Bayesian Approaches In Statistics
Imagine you obtained some data from a particular collection of things. It could be the heights of individuals within a group of people, the weights of cats in a clowder, the number of petals in a bouquet of flowers, and so on. Such collections are … [Continue reading]
An Intuitive Introduction To Combinatorics
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics with applications in many fields, such as physics, economics, computer programming, and many others. In particular, probability theory is one of the fields that makes heavy use of combinatorics in a wide … [Continue reading]
Calculating Compound Event Probabilities
Probabilities can be thought of as measures of uncertainty in the occurrence of an event, the truth of a hypothesis, and so on. These measures are numbers between 0 and 1. 0 means the event is impossible to occur and 1 means the event is certain to … [Continue reading]
Probability: What Is It, Really?
Throughout history, we have come up with better and more accurate ways to measure physical quantities like time, length, mass, and temperature. This has been crucial for our scientific and technological development. Each of these quantities has a … [Continue reading]
Calculating Coin Bias With Bayes’ Theorem
Why do people flip coins to resolve disputes? It usually happens when neither of two sides wants to compromise with the other about a particular decision. They choose the coin to be the unbiased agent that decides whose way things are going to go. … [Continue reading]