5 ms·

What is the variance? skewness?

gjm11 13y ago
How are you wanting to measure those for a Bernoulli variable? In any given case, the plaintiff either wins or loses. Assuming different cases are independent (which is probably at least a decent assumption), there's no more to say about the distribution than the win probability. You could of course ask about the variance, skewness, kurtosis, 17th moment, etc., of the distribution of damages awarded or length of trial or total lawyers' fees or something. But for the actual win-or-lose figures, the question doesn't make sense. Well, it kinda makes sense. Define the outcome to be 0 if the plaintiff loses and 1 if the plaintiff wins. Then with a win probability of 0.78 the variance is 0.17, the skewness is -1.35, the excess kurtosis is -0.17, etc., but there's no more information in any of these numbers than was already provided when we learned that the probability was 0.78.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  I understood differently, that the parent was asking for the distribution of win rates per town.
- agravier 13y ago
  I don't understand what you don't understand, given that you are yourself taking each county/town (not sure what is the atomic unit of judicial division here) as one RV to which you associate a winning rate. There are surely enough of them to get them in bins of winning rate. Anyway, my point was to highlight that the mean alone is not very informative.
  - gjm11 13y ago
    Ah! You were asking about the distribution of win rates across counties or towns or whatever. I completely misunderstood and thought you were asking for more information about the distribution of wins and losses within Marshall. My apologies.
    - gjm11 13y ago
      I am disturbed to see that the great-grandparent of this comment (the one saying "that doesn't make sense for a Bernoulli variable) has attracted 5 new upvotes since the parent of this comment (the one saying "oops, that was a mistake") was posted. Everybody: Please stop upvoting my wrong comment. It was wrong. At best it may suggest a lack of clarity in the comment it was replying to, but that doesn't deserve 10 upvotes. Thank you. (Not that I mind being upvoted as such, but I do wish I saw more correlation between the quality of my comments and the votes they attract.)
deleted 13y ago
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- agravier 13y ago
  Not sure if your whole reply is sarcastic. See my reply to gjm11 if what you need is an explanation of what I wrote.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

gjm11 13y ago

How are you wanting to measure those for a Bernoulli variable? In any given case, the plaintiff either wins or loses. Assuming different cases are independent (which is probably at least a decent assumption), there's no more to say about the distribution than the win probability. You could of course ask about the variance, skewness, kurtosis, 17th moment, etc., of the distribution of damages awarded or length of trial or total lawyers' fees or something. But for the actual win-or-lose figures, the question doesn't make sense. Well, it kinda makes sense. Define the outcome to be 0 if the plaintiff loses and 1 if the plaintiff wins. Then with a win probability of 0.78 the variance is 0.17, the skewness is -1.35, the excess kurtosis is -0.17, etc., but there's no more information in any of these numbers than was already provided when we learned that the probability was 0.78.

ronaldx 13y ago
I understood differently, that the parent was asking for the distribution of win rates per town.
agravier 13y ago
I don't understand what you don't understand, given that you are yourself taking each county/town (not sure what is the atomic unit of judicial division here) as one RV to which you associate a winning rate. There are surely enough of them to get them in bins of winning rate. Anyway, my point was to highlight that the mean alone is not very informative.
- gjm11 13y ago
  Ah! You were asking about the distribution of win rates across counties or towns or whatever. I completely misunderstood and thought you were asking for more information about the distribution of wins and losses within Marshall. My apologies.
  - gjm11 13y ago
    I am disturbed to see that the great-grandparent of this comment (the one saying "that doesn't make sense for a Bernoulli variable) has attracted 5 new upvotes since the parent of this comment (the one saying "oops, that was a mistake") was posted. Everybody: Please stop upvoting my wrong comment. It was wrong. At best it may suggest a lack of clarity in the comment it was replying to, but that doesn't deserve 10 upvotes. Thank you. (Not that I mind being upvoted as such, but I do wish I saw more correlation between the quality of my comments and the votes they attract.)

deleted 13y ago

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agravier 13y ago
Not sure if your whole reply is sarcastic. See my reply to gjm11 if what you need is an explanation of what I wrote.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]