3 ms·
> As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us not
by est31 6y ago
> As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing.
That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant component. In the 15-24 age group, the top 1 cause has 13.4k deaths, the top 2 has 5.7k, and homicide has 5.1k. That's not very far away in relative terms.
- NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago> but please note that it's still a significant component. I guess my overall point is it's not important. Even if the ordinal ranking is informative in this case (your argument), the overall likelihood of any kind of death is so low that we shouldn't care very much about the ranking.