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As someone working in the field I struggle with this type of writing because it is both helpful but also misrepresents the fundamental problem with how statisti

As someone working in the field I struggle with this type of writing because it is both helpful but also misrepresents the fundamental problem with how statistics are messaged. Few statisticians would argue that big data driven statistics demonstrates determinism in action. Simply that certain markers are more likely than others to predict likely outcomes. None of this explains why something happened simply that it was likely it would. In the first example of the doctor purposely killing his patients a statistician would say this doctor fit the statistically predicted outcome. But what isn't discussed is that this doctor must have existed as an anomaly within his career group. He had to have been ABNORMALLY excellent as a doctor, it is the only way he could hide his victims within his normal morbidity rates. This is one of the reasons anomaly detection is such an interesting field because it requires dimensional understanding of a subject.

mcguire 7y ago
"Then a biostatistician at Cambridge, Spiegelhalter found that Shipman’s excess mortality—the number of his older patients who had died in the course of his career over the number that would be expected of an average doctor’s—was a hundred and seventy-four women and forty-nine men at the time of his arrest."
- ohbleek 7y ago
  Just to add to your comment: Excess mortality is the number of deaths, or mortality, caused by a specific disease, condition, or exposure to harmful circumstances such as radiation, environmental chemicals, or natural disaster. It's a measure of the deaths which occurred over and above the regular death rate that would be predicted (in the absence of that negative defined circumstance) for a given population. Had the doctor not murdered any patients, he would have had the expected number of patient deaths, but the Cambridge statistician found that the number of patients that died under his care almost perfectly matched the expected number plus the number he murdered, meaning he was a statistically average doctor when he wasn’t murdering his patients.

mcguire 7y ago

"Then a biostatistician at Cambridge, Spiegelhalter found that Shipman’s excess mortality—the number of his older patients who had died in the course of his career over the number that would be expected of an average doctor’s—was a hundred and seventy-four women and forty-nine men at the time of his arrest."

ohbleek 7y ago
Just to add to your comment: Excess mortality is the number of deaths, or mortality, caused by a specific disease, condition, or exposure to harmful circumstances such as radiation, environmental chemicals, or natural disaster. It's a measure of the deaths which occurred over and above the regular death rate that would be predicted (in the absence of that negative defined circumstance) for a given population. Had the doctor not murdered any patients, he would have had the expected number of patient deaths, but the Cambridge statistician found that the number of patients that died under his care almost perfectly matched the expected number plus the number he murdered, meaning he was a statistically average doctor when he wasn’t murdering his patients.