Talk:2311: Confidence Interval

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 17:57, 26 May 2020 by 172.68.142.47 (talk) (Suggestions for improvement on the shape of the two confidence intervals: new section)
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What's a millisigma? 162.158.107.209 03:31, 26 May 2020 (UTC)Ven

Not an official scientific term - most likely referring to standard deviation. One standard deviation, or sigma, is the 68.3 % of values lying around the mean in a normal distribution. A millisigma in a standard deviation would be .0683 % of a normal distribution so that much variation would be bad? Not sure. 172.69.63.203 05:23, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Actually, if you integrate a normal distribution \mathcal{N}(0,1) from -\frac{\sigma}{1000}=-0.001 to +\frac{\sigma}{1000}=0.001, you'll get a range of about 0.08% of all values. This would be bad because it would mean that, as big as the confidence interval appears in the picture, the more meaningful 1- or 3-sigma interval (whose size represents the uncertainty of the model) would be larger by a factor of 1250 or 3750, respectively. --Koveras (talk) 08:38, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps you heard about Six Sigma, a quality method used by General Electric (among others) to keep specifications and processes within tiny tolerances. The six sigmas mean that even absolute (so-called) outliers in your production are within the strict tolerances. With milli-sigmas it is extremely seldom to get an acceptable result at all. Sebastian --108.162.229.234 10:53, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Can it be related to Covid19 pandemic and all those graphs that try to predict if it is in decline or not? Tkopec (talk) 08:27, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

No. But maybe it's related to the recent Mt. St. Helens comic... :p Seriously, not everything has to be related to the hot-button topic of the day.
Au contraire, mes amis, it is obvious to me that 1: Barrel - Part 1 is about socially isolating away from the virus. (Remember to sign?) 162.158.158.237 10:56, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Isn't the (or a) reason that this is a science tip is that having confidence lines are off the page makes it look as if the prediction is precise? 141.101.99.65 11:35, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Real life example of this comic (scroll down to Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, etc): https://rt.live/ Godzilla (talk) 15:26, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

The smaller the error or uncertainty value, the larger the confidence number. A confidence value of less than 1 is usually considered unreliable, but may justify further experiments/observations. Confidence that is practically indistinguishable from 0 means the result is only marginally better than pure chance or a result showing no correlation. Said another way, you have no confidence in your observations. Nutster (talk) 13:41, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement on the shape of the two confidence intervals

https://imgur.com/gallery/dBvxzxF 172.68.142.47 17:57, 26 May 2020 (UTC)