Statisticians say the darnedest things. At least, that’s how it can seem if you’re not well-versed in statistics.
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When I began studying statistics, I approached it as a language. I quickly noticed that, compared to other disciplines, statistics has some unique problems with terminology. These are problems that don’t affect most scientific and academic specialties.
For example, dairy science has a highly specialized vocabulary, which I picked up when I was an editor at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. I found the jargon fascinating, but not particularly confusing to learn. Why? Because words like “rumen” and “abomasum” and “omasum” simply don’t turn up in common parlance. They have very specific meaning, and there’s little chance of misinterpreting them.
Now open up a statistics text and flip to the glossary. There are plenty of statistics-specific terms, but you’re going to see a lot of very common words as well. The problem is that in statistics, these common words don’t necessarily mean what they do outside statistics.
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Comments
Regression
Thanks for the interesting article. It has been my understanding that Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase "regression to the mean". He used the word "regression" because of his study of genetics in which tall parents and their children do not have taller and taller children - the same on the short end of things. Instead the heights of progeny tend to "regress toward the mean". Regression has since come to imply correlation, but the original use by Galton did seem to mean to regress or slide back (toward the mean).
Average VS Mean, Median, Mode
Hello Mr. Martz:
Would you support further definition of the term "Average" as the Mean as you have defined it, in order to differentiate from other ways to define "Average" using median and mode? I am not a statistician but I think publications sometime use the median or mode of a data set and call it the "average".
Thank you, Dirk van Putten
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