Quotable Mathematics

"Statistical methods are tools of scientific investigation. Scientific investigation is a controlled learning process in which various ...

"[…] data analysis in the context of basic mathematical concepts and skills. The ability to use and interpret simple graphical and nume...

"The discrepancy between our mental models and the real world may be a major problem of our times; especially in view of the difficulty...

"Data are generally collected as a basis for action. However, unless potential signals are separated from probable noise, the actions t...

"[...] any hope that we are smart enough to find even transiently optimum solutions to our data analysis problems is doomed to failure,...

"In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of o...

  "Longitudinal data sets are comprised of repeated observations of an outcome and a set of covariates for each of many subjects. One o...

"A classification tree is perhaps the simplest form of algorithm, since it consists of a series of yes/no questions, the answer to each...

"Beliefs are generalizations about the past projected onto the present and future to shape it in the image of the past. [...] When we g...

"Diagrams are sometimes used, not merely to convey several pieces  of information such as several time series on one chart, but also to...

  "To find signals in data, we must learn to reduce the noise - not just the noise that resides in the data, but also the noise that re...

"Modeling involves a style of scientific thinking in which the argument is structured by the model, but in which the application is ach...

"Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the da...

"An algorithm, meanwhile, is a step-by-step recipe for performing a series of actions, and in most cases 'algorithm' means simp...

"A statistical index has all the potential pitfalls of any descriptive statistic - plus the distortions introduced by combining multipl...

"A predictive model overfits the training set when at least some of the predictions it returns are based on spurious patterns present i...