Simpson's Paradox is an example of the Reversal Paradox, where an association appears in several different groups of data but disappears, or even reverses in sign, when these groups are combined.
Questions tagged [simpsons-paradox]
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How to resolve Simpson's paradox?
Simpson's paradox is a classic puzzle discussed in introductory statistics courses worldwide. However, my course was content to simply note that a problem existed and did not provide a solution. I would like to know how to resolve the paradox. That…
Potato
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How to handle Simpson's paradox
Simpson's "paradox" is a well-known phenomenon that can be counter-intuitive for beginners: it is possible, say, for a medical trial to reveal that a certain treatment is beneficial to men as a group and to women as a group, but harmful to humans in…
Aryeh
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Simpson's Paradox vs. Berkson's paradox
Can someone explain what is the difference between the two? They seem to me to be identical. In both paradoxes you start from a narrow distribution and find out the correlation switches when you move to the full distribution. So what's the…
Maverick Meerkat
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Is this Simpson's Paradox on the Titanic data set?
With the well known "Survival of passengers on the Titanic" data set I get a strange behaviour by plotting the fare vs. the age (see below). Without a constraint on Pclass the correlation is positive. In contrast for all Pclasses the correlations…
chris elgoog
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Intuition needed when using weighted average to explain Simpson's paradox
In Freedman's Statistics (chapter 2), the author uses Berkeley's admission statistics (that 44% men and 35% women were admitted to graduate programs in general) to illustrate Simpson's paradox: the difference in overall admission rate per gender…
seismatica
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Any examples of generalisation of simpson's paradox to other metrics
Simpson's paradox is introduced on wikipedia using 'metrics' of success rates and regression coefficients, for the first (success rate of kidney stone treatments): How to resolve Simpson's paradox?, and the second: Coefficient changes sign when…
Alex
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What to look for to spot potential cases of Simpson's paradox?
I understand the basics of Simpson's paradox, but I'm not yet confident that I'd always be able to "avoid" it, or to spot cases where others have failed to do so. To be more precise, I'm not sure I would always be able to spot situations in which…
kjo
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A question about resolving Simpson's paradox by normalization
I recently asked a question about Simpson's paradox. Suppose we are concerned about making some choice about an arbitrary element of a population. Recall that Simpson's paradox arises when the answer suggested by the aggregate data differs from the…
Potato
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