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The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

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Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#2

Post by bognition »

>As an analyst, one needs to keep in mind that the Journey is more important than reaching the Destination.

I'm really not sure what to make of the last line. The goal of analysis should be to produce results that are actionable. In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#4

Post by apathy »

bognition wrote: post #2

>As an analyst, one needs to keep in mind that the Journey is more important than reaching the Destination. I'm really not sure what to make of the last line. The goal of analysis should be to produce results that are actionable. In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

Accurate results are not necessarily actionable.

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#5

Post by RA_Fisher »

bognition wrote: post #2

>As an analyst, one needs to keep in mind that the Journey is more important than reaching the Destination. I'm really not sure what to make of the last line. The goal of analysis should be to produce results that are actionable. In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

A lot of times an action is the product of many analyses that individually aren't actionable. To me it's similar to managing fixed vs. variable costs. You've got to make investments of various size, but the payoff needs to correspond to the investment.

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#6

Post by bognition »

apathy wrote: post #4
bognition wrote: post #2

>As an analyst, one needs to keep in mind that the Journey is more important than reaching the Destination. I'm really not sure what to make of the last line. The goal of analysis should be to produce results that are actionable. In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

Accurate results are not necessarily actionable.

correct, but inaccurate results are never actionable.

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#7

Post by auvi »

Can anybody reading this comment please enlighten me on good algorithms for optimum bin sizes for histograms? I have tried DW Scott's (1979) method. But are there any new better kid in the block?

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#9

Post by Glimjaur »

auvi wrote: post #7

Can anybody reading this comment please enlighten me on good algorithms for optimum bin sizes for histograms? I have tried DW Scott's (1979) method. But are there any new better kid in the block?

I'm by no means an expert in the area, but i know that the Freedman-Diaconis rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedman%E2%80%93Diaconis_rule) is used by the seaborn Python plotting library (https://web.stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/index.htm...) which seems to consistently produce good results.

Re: The Fallacy of Seeing Patterns

#10

Post by ACow_Adonis »

bognition wrote: post #2

>As an analyst, one needs to keep in mind that the Journey is more important than reaching the Destination. I'm really not sure what to make of the last line. The goal of analysis should be to produce results that are actionable. In the end it should matter very little how they are obtained as long as they are accurate.

Well, as an analyst looking forward to finding future jobs, its often more important :P
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