Stats Ch. 8

Jeanne Calment and Life Expectancy

Monthly payments until death assuming she would die early, but she lived til 122

Individuals are random, groups are predictable

Driver sees a moose and it feels random, but it is expected in a large population

The fuel-rationing thought experiment

the government will either assign mileage specific to each person or increase gasoline prices. result: traffic fatalities decline in proportion to reduced driving

William the Conqueror

ordered surveys of the population for taxation and administration - one of the earliest examples of systematic government data collection

London’s Bills of Mortality

London began compiling weekly records of births, baptisms, burials and causes of death - especially important during plague outbreaks

John Graunt

founder of statistics - a London merchant who was fascinated with mortality records

Graunt’s Method

Examined mortality data during plagues

William Petty

political arithmetic (early form of quantative social science) - argued governments should use numbers and evidence when making decisions

Graunt’s Life Tables

using mortality records, Graunt development one of the first life tables - still used today for insurance companies, etc

Statistics word

from the German word Statistik

Laplace argued probability and statistics could be used to

assess legal evidence, estimate marriage rates, calculate insurnace risk

Adolphe Quetelet

Belgian mathematician, astronomer, statistician - worked with Laplace

Quetelet’s discovery

crime is stable - total murders are higher predictable

L’Homme Moyen

Quetelet’s Average Man - the hypothetical average person representing society

Statistical fraud

Quetlet’s discovery - bread weight - baker was purposefully making it lighter

Simeon Poisson

studied weights - if measurements are honest, bell curve should appear

Stephen Wolfram

Sports betting and point shaving - UCLA vs Caltech - forecast error = actual margin - predicted margin - forecast errors should form a bell curve - discovery = for most games, its predictions were accurate but in games with heavy favorites, favorites often won by slightly less than expected

Quetelet’s greater goal

Laws governing human behavior - society has equilibrium

September 11 example

after 9/11 - many people avoided airplanes —> increased highway travel —> 1,000 additional highway fatalities occured

Limits of Quetelet’s theory

while he found patterns, he couldn’t explain them

Francis Glaton

Charles darwin’s cousin, mathematician, explorer, pioneer in statistics

Galton’s question

why do children resemble parents? - regression toward the mean = extreme values tend to be followed by less extreme values

Correlation defintiion

a measure describing how strongly two variables move together

Karl Pearson

developed correlation mathematic, chi-square testing