3 ms·
> It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks li
by justinpombrio 5y ago
> It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
It's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths over time: there's way more probability mass in the extremes than you would expect from a normal distribution. This sort of thing (modelling something poorly, then getting all surprised when reality violates your model) is depressingly common.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
- jameshart 5y agoOverall death rates are highly affected by age distribution in the population - the proportion of 80-100 year olds in your population in a given year is going to have a big impact on the death rate that year. Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable. Also, pretty dubious about that specific dataset - it looks like it includes linear interpolations between a much smaller set of actual datapoints, so not sure you can use it to infer the actual distribution of death rate statistics
- justinpombrio 5y ago> Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable. Do you have a data set for this to look at? I'm skeptical that death rates of any kind are close to normally distributed. If nothing else, there are big spikes during plagues, like the black plague and spanish flu.