Why are three-pointer shots from the corner more efficient than the ones above the break? The answer: More than 90 percent of corner three-point shots are assisted.
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Articles on Statistics
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An obsession with statistics has made teams better than ever – but the game is now more tedious for fans to watch.
Roughly one-third of the league won’t be trying to win this season. What’s fueling this trend?
The scheme has many critics, but the numbers show that it’s working well.
It’s hard to decide which treatment to choose when trying to quit smoking or lose weight. The term ‘number needed to treat’ could help you decide what is most likely to work.
Psychological phenomena like confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect make it easy for people to fall for deliberate or inadvertent lies in the news.
Number crunching the winning race time for marathon athletes can tell us when the men are likely to break the two-hour barrier. But what about a target barrier for women marathon runners?
Numbers alone don’t relay the importance of people seeing their own experiences and lives mirrored in popular culture.
In January, measles returned to the Pacific Northwest, while Ebola resurged in the Congo. It would take a lot more research for scientists to be able to stop threats like these in their tracks.
Numbers are largely viewed as holding the truth. But this is an unrealistic expectation.
It’s cheaper to prevent biological invasions than to react after they happen. But it’s hard to detect invaders while there are still just a few of them. Knowing when and where to look can help.
Less than 10 percent of plastic waste has been recycled – a factoid recently crowned statistic of the year.
Their analysis finds that the costs exceed the benefits by over $170 billion – but it includes four major errors in the calculations.
How useful is the information you get from the measure of any thing? That depends on what you chose measure in the first place, and that’s not always clear.
Science is in a reproducibility crisis. This is driven in part by invalid statistical analyses that happen long after the data are collected – the opposite of how things are traditionally done.
A new statistical test lets researchers search for similarities between groups. Could this help keep new important findings out of the file drawer?
Police practices like stop and frisk are often criticized as racial profiling. But it can be tricky to figure out from the data which officers are the worst offenders.
What do stats really mean in the real world? Here’s an example from leukaemia research to help you identify if a result really is important.
Shrewd media consumers think about these three statistical pitfalls that can be the difference between a world-changing announcement and misleading hype.
McDonald’s Canada has brought back its popular Monopoly game. A statistician explains the odds of winning the top prizes and how that compares to the odds we confront in everyday life.
Top contributors
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Professor of the Practice of Data Science, Washington University in St. Louis
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Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology
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Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Glasgow
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Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
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Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia
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Professor of Business and Sports Analytics, University of Leeds
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Professor of Economics and Public Policy, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
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Associate Professor, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo
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Professor of Statistics and Interim Dean, College of Science, Virginia Tech
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Professor of Statistics, Queensland University of Technology
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Associate Professor, Centre for Social Research and Methods, Director, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Australian National University
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Professor of Bioinformatics, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
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Professor, Future Fellow and Head of Statistics at UNSW, and a Deputy Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS), UNSW Sydney
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Biostatistician, The University of Melbourne
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Geoff Cumming is a Friend of The Conversation.
Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University
