3 ms·

No dude- you were right and he was wrong.

• StavrosK 16y ago
  No, he's saying that if you have a few outliers to begin with you expect to get more normal-looking data later on, drowning your outliers in them. If you get 5 heads initially and then another 5 heads and 5 tails, it's still closer to the mean than when you began.
  • ssebro 16y ago
    That can't be right, since the each point in the data is independent. In a 50/50 coin-flip game where you get 9 coins come up heads, the probability that the next coin flip results in tails is still 50%. What you need to understand is that probability deals with uncertain events. So instead of thinking about the final count needing to be around 50% heads and 50% tails, you should expect the count of the yet undecided part to converge around 50% heads, 50% tails.
    • beder 16y ago
      I just noticed this thread continued, but I'm not sure what you're worried about. The two things you said: * the final count will be about 50/50 * the remaining part will be about 50/50 are actually the same thing (since we're talking about a limit). That is, we could flip a fair coin a billion times, get all heads, and still, in the long run, expect the total ratio to converge to 1/2 (imagine flipping the coin forever - that initial billion flips won't even be a blip on the graph).