Statistical Data Quotes & Sayings

By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed. — James O'Shaughnessy

Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on scraps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, length of sleep, amounts eaten.
Then, I did what any obsessed person would do these days; I put it all on the Web. — Mike Brown

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose. — Edward R. Tufte

My second decision, to leave out statistical esoterica, was made with much less regret. I don't mention confidence intervals, sample sizes, p values, and similar devices in Dataclysm because the book is above all a popularization of data and data science. Mathematical wonkiness wasn't what I wanted to get across. — Christian Rudder

And all of the scientific data, statistical facts and empirical evidence can't compete with the indefinable heart's desire. For if in the end, she loves you, and she chooses you ... none of the rest of this will matter. — Ruth Clampett

There seemed to be too much gathering of data for their own sake without any thought of practical application - an inevitable development in a statistical and evaluation office unless sternly controlled. — Gordon W. Prange

That so far the material has been dealt with in a rather subjective way provokes the question whether a means can be found of handling it objectively. [...] This chapter considers the applicability of the statistical tests employed by Wilson and the general problem whether the Linear B data are suited to statistical analysis. — Jennifer K. McArthur

Knowledge [...] no longer consists in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person. — Ruth Nanda Anshen

Faith doesn't rely on odds or statistical data. God only requires that we have faith; the rest is up to him. — Nancy Stephan

Baseball also has statistical rigor. Its gurus have an immense data set at hand, almost all of it directly related to the performance of players in the game. Moreover, their data is highly relevant to the outcomes they are trying to predict. This may sound obvious, but as we'll see throughout this book, the folks building WMDs routinely lack data for the behaviors they're most interested in. So they substitute stand-in data, or proxies. They draw statistical correlations between a person's zip code or language patterns and her potential to pay back a loan or handle a job. These correlations are discriminatory, and some of them are illegal. — Cathy O'Neil

Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker - he didn't conduct a single statistical analysis in his life - while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection. — Frans De Waal

I don't think there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that. — Vaclav Klaus

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways. — Alison Gopnik

A story, meanwhile, fills out the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no idea how a story fits into the larger scheme of things. A good story also includes the passage of time, to show the degree of constancy or change; without a time frame, we can't judge whether we're looking at something truly noteworthy or just an anomalous blip. And a story lays out a daisy chain of events, to show the causes that lead up to a particular situation and the consequences that result from it. — Steven D. Levitt

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue. — Ronald Fisher

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem). — Charles Wheelan

We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere. — Satya Nadella

1. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better make sure kids can't get guns.
2. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better find out what's making these kids want to kill, fix that, and then they won't want to use guns to kill teachers and classmates.
See what I did there? Which statement makes more sense? Don't bring up politics. Don't refer to statistical data. Don't nervously look at your cell phone. Just read the two statements and be honest with yourself. We can do better. We're smarter than this. WAKE UP. — Aaron B. Powell

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense. — Darrell Huff

No data are excluded on subjective or arbitrary grounds. No one piece of data is more highly valued than another. The consequences of this policy have to be accepted, even if they prove awkward. — Jennifer K. McArthur

Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets "can lead us," says Levesque, "to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants. — Nicholas Carr

And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. — Paul Bloom

A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made. — Morris H. DeGroot

For ecommerce data derived from digital experiences, such as the keywords and phrases from search engines to the frequency of purchases of various customer segments, data is most often not normally distributed. Thus, much of the classic and Bayesian statistical methods taught in schools are not immediately applicable to digital ecommerce data. That does not mean that the classic methods you learned in college or business school do not apply to digital data; it means that the best analysts understand this fact. — Judah Phillips

If we had enough data then this statistical approach would undoubtedly sort out these things, and a lot of problems are arising precisely because we haven't got enough documents for the statistical approach to be wholly valid. I know you can calculate levels of probability and so forth, but to establish this really clearly we want a lot more information than we have actually got available. This is surely our major problem that we are still at the very limits at which you can use a technique of this sort. - John Chadwick — Jennifer K. McArthur