Tag Archives: Probability concepts

Recommended: ProbOnto

This page is moving to a new website.

If you work with probability distributions a lot, you find there are mutliple parameterizations (e.g., the two different forms of the exponential distribution), as well as interesting relationships (the geometric distribution is a discrete version of the exponential distribution). I have found Wikipedia to be a nice guide for some of this, but the coverage is uneven in quality. One of the Wikipedia links mentioned a new website, ProbOnto, that offers a systematic and standardized attempt to catalog every important probability distribution and the relationships among these distributions. Continue reading →

PMean: About those “awful” election predictions

If you were on Mars for the past few days, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump has won the election. There has been a lot of commentary lately about how badly the predictions about the U.S. election have been and someone mentioned that even Nate Silver at the fivethirtyeight website had a predicted probability of a Clinton win at 71%. I wrote a brief comment that predicting an event with 71% probability does not mean that your prediction was “wrong” if the other event occurs. Continue reading →

Recommended: Why Coincidences, Miracles And Rare Events Happen Every Day.

This is an interview with David Hand, the author of a new book, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen Every Day. The discussion raises the issue of events that seem highly improbable based on a simple probability calculation, but which nevertheless, are not that uncommon. Continue reading →