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I admit I don't know the math well so I am curious to know how to fix my intuition: Let's say you want to figure out the unknown bias on two coins. You flip bo
by rawnlq 10y ago
I admit I don't know the math well so I am curious to know how to fix my intuition:
Let's say you want to figure out the unknown bias on two coins. You flip both continuously and plot the percentage of heads you see. Due to law of large numbers these percentages will eventually converge to true probabilities (which is how I am interpreting the graphs in that blog post).
The bad case is if the two coins are actually "flatlined" in the wrong order so as a pattern matching human you mistakenly believe the rates have converged prematurely. I don't know how to work out the math on this but let's say a "flatline" is visually 100 points or so with no significant slope. Then this should be pretty rare right?
- btilly 10y agoDon't try to do this by visual pattern recognition. Do math. There are plenty of statistical tests that you can use, use them. Any of them is better than looking at a graph and guessing from the shape. If you want to try to understand what is going on, learn the Central Limit Theorem. That will let you know how fast the convergence is to the laws of large numbers. (There are two, the strong and the weak.)