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Is Your Ad Really Working? A Statistical Approach to Measuring Performance
Regardless of the business objectives and goals, what separates a thriving business from a failing one is the customer. Without customers, there would be no lifeline for the business; thus, no matter how brilliant the product or service is, it’s doomed to fail. Of course, one way to increase the customer base is by running…
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From Sample to Population: A Quick Guide to Confidence Intervals with R
Accessing the whole population in most cases is not possible. Even when it’s possible, the costs of conducting a census can be astronomically high. What we do instead is take a sample and estimate statistics of interest from it. Suppose we are interested in finding out the average salary of students who graduated recently. Since…
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Alpha, Beta, and the Cost of Wrong Decisions in Business Analytics
I have an academic background in business. Generally, statistics play a big role in business decisions. Usually, when executive managers face a strategic decision, they rely on data to make sure they understand the consequences of the outcome. Statistics play a big role in analyzing data. Often, a business decision boils down to a yes/no…
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Understanding Standard Error (and How It Differs from Standard Deviation)
This is probably one of the concepts that trips many new students in Statistics. But before we go further, let’s first understand what standard deviation is. In any dataset, whether it’s the entire population or just a sample from it, the mean is the simple sum of all the values divided by the number of…
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Sample Distribution and Sampling Distribution; Are They the Same?
If you’ve taken any statistics courses before, there’s a good chance you’ve heard these two terms: Sample Distribution and Sampling Distribution. Because the terms sound so similar, it’s easy to think they mean the same thing. However, they actually refer to two different distributions, and not understanding the difference can cause confusion in more advanced…
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Why Probability Is About Theoretical Outcomes, Not Guarantees
Although statistics may seem straightforward at first glance, the learning curve can actually be quite steep. Understanding basic distributions is crucial in this regard. This article aims to provide a simple explanation of binomial distributions. Flipping a coin is one of the simplest probability examples to understand, which is why many textbooks use it. If…
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Permutations and Combinations in Everyday Life
People who know me are aware of my deep admiration for mathematics. As famously said, mathematics brings order to chaos. It’s only through mathematics that we can comprehend the phenomena around us and make life easier. Permutations and combinations are among the most practical topics in mathematics. They help us to find out the number…