Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange
Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [terminology]

Usage and meaning of specific technical words/concepts in statistics.

From computing.surrey.ac.uk

Three major points:

  1. Firstly, proper terminology is concerned with the relationship between concepts, and between them and their designations, rather than with designations alone or with the objects they represent. This point is essential if quality is to be achieved, especially with synonyms and in multilingual environments.
  2. Secondly, a designation does not necessarily have to be a word or phrase, although it often is. Thus terminological resources may comprise symbols, drawings, formulae, codes, etc. as well as, or even instead of, words. This point is especially important given the move to multimedia systems.
  3. Thirdly, terminology is inextricably linked with specialist knowledge and hence with special languages or languages for special purposes (LSPs).
1682 questions
116
votes
20 answers

What misused statistical terms are worth correcting?

Statistics is everywhere; common usage of statistical terms is, however, often unclear. The terms probability and odds are used interchangeable in lay English despite their well-defined and different mathematical expressions. Not separating the term…
Antoni Parellada
  • 26,280
28
votes
7 answers

Is a model fitted to data or is data fitted to a model?

Is there a conceptual or procedural difference between fitting a model to data and fitting data to model? An example of the first wording can be seen in https://courses.washington.edu/matlab1/ModelFitting.html, and of the second in…
enjayes
  • 433
  • 1
  • 4
  • 8
22
votes
2 answers

Why the name "kernel" in stats and ML?

This has been asked on other SE sites in the context of operating systems and linear algebra, but the same question bugs me regarding kernel methods used in statistics and machine learning. Often it is said that kernels, e.g. in kernel density…
Blaza
  • 383
21
votes
3 answers

What does Theta mean?

I am a newbie to statistics and found this. In statistics, θ, the lowercase Greek letter 'theta', is the usual name for a (vector of) parameter(s) of some general probability distribution. A common problem is to find the value(s) of theta. …
Kamilski81
  • 405
17
votes
8 answers

What is the meaning of a gold standard?

While reading a few papers, I came across the term "gold set" or "gold standard". What I don't understand is what makes a dataset gold standard? Peer acceptance, citation count and if its the liberty of the researcher and the relevance to problem he…
Tathagata
  • 471
17
votes
2 answers

What does a data-generating process (DGP) actually mean?

I am having some trouble understanding exactly what is meant by a DGP. Let's say it is stated that "the DGP is given as $y=a+bx+e$ where the error term fulfills all the OLS assumptions. Does this mean a) Given knowledge of the value $x$ takes one…
Jemlin95
  • 311
15
votes
10 answers

Common words that have particular statistical meanings

I am not a statistician but my research work involves statistics (analyzing data, reading literature, etc.). I was again reminded from a comment on one of my questions posted here that there are some common words that have particularly specific…
user4045
  • 555
14
votes
4 answers

Is there a colloquial way of saying "small but significant"?

I sometimes speak about statistical results to a popular audience, and the term "significant" can (understandably) be misunderstood. I sometimes want to say something like "the likelihood of seeing these results under the null hypothesis is small…
Xodarap
  • 2,608
12
votes
1 answer

Is there a better name than "average of the integral"?

I'm testing throttle position sensors (TPS) my business sells and I print the plot of voltage response to the throttle shaft's rotation. A TPS is a rotational sensor with $\approx$ 90° of range and the output is like a potentiometer with full open…
Krista K
  • 223
12
votes
5 answers

What is the statistics term for exact value that occurs in otherwise continous distribution?

For some continuous quantities (e.g. daily rainfall at a certain location), there is one exact value that occurs often (in the case of daily rainfall that's the value of zero: there are days on which it does not rain). However, for continuous…
Bernard Postema
  • 121
11
votes
1 answer

What is the name of the percentage that defines a prediction interval?

For example, say I'm creating a forecast for weather patterns and I am looking for a 95% prediction interval (essentially an upper and lower bound for that forecast); what is the name of that 95% parameter? Researching I've found 'confidence level',…
Trevor Lowe
  • 111
11
votes
1 answer

"hard-mining", "hard examples", ... - Does "hard" mean anything specific in statistics when not applied to problem difficulty?

The conference paper Jean Ogier Du Terrail, Frédéric Jurie. ON THE USE OF DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS FOR THE DETECTION OF SMALL VEHICLES IN ORTHO-IMAGES. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Sep 2017, Beijing, China. (PDF) uses the…
das-g
  • 213
8
votes
2 answers

What does "$\sim$" mean and $A | B \sim C$?

I'm not sure if I fully understand the meaning of the symbol, I've seen this symbol in various articles but haven't managed to understand what they implied. I did some reading and it looks like $A \sim B$ means B-Distribution of random variable…
Iancovici
  • 795
  • 2
  • 5
  • 17
8
votes
1 answer

What is the difference between buckets and bins?

When calculating a histogram we do data binning, or group a number of more or less continuous values into a smaller number of "bins". But in bucket sort we set up buckets and assign a bucket to each value of some collection, according to its value.…
gerrit
  • 1,439
8
votes
2 answers

Applied statistics vs Mathematical statistics

The Help Center for this site says we can ask question about, among other things, mathematical statistics. I am curious to find out what mathematical statistics is. And I thought it might be easier for people to explain something in contrast to…
qoheleth
  • 1,472
1
2 3 4 5 6