statistics

Using GPT-5.6 Sol Pro, Edgar Dobriban disproved a long-standing conjecture that the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure controls the false discovery rate for correlated two-sided Gaussian tests, showing it fails at a small but real level. The result is conceptual with limited practical impact but resolves a central question in statistics.

The article discusses problems with UK economic statistics accuracy, particularly around entrepreneurship, and suggests that official figures may be missing a solopreneur boom as indicated by Stripe data.

The author uses a photo of scuff marks on a subway station wall to estimate the height distribution of commuters, applying image processing and a heuristic body-to-scuff ratio, and discusses potential improvements using Bayesian methods.

LineageOS releases updated statistics on device installs and community growth.

An interactive exploration of Benford's Law across real datasets, explaining the mathematical phenomenon where the digit 1 appears as the first digit about 30% of the time, and its applications in fraud detection.

This article explains hazard ratios in health studies, why they cannot be directly converted to life expectancy changes without considering risk distribution over time, and clarifies the difference between hazard ratios and relative risks.

This article details the learning path for an ordinary person to become a quantitative trader, covering five stages: probability, statistics, linear algebra, calculus, and stochastic calculus. It also explains the industry's compensation structure, interview requirements, and the rapid growth of AI/ML positions.

This article argues that observational evidence is underappreciated compared to randomized controlled trials, using historical examples from the 18th century to illustrate its efficiency and power.

An educational thread explaining the mathematical foundations used by quantitative trading firms like Renaissance Technologies, covering concepts from Bernoulli to Brownian motion.

A tweet highlights 10 free, open-source software tools developed by universities that outperform or rival expensive paid alternatives, covering reference management, text analysis, network visualization, GIS, statistics, speech analysis, biological networks, data cleaning, research archiving, and note-taking.

Recommend an interactive visualization website called Seeing Theory to help users intuitively understand core concepts of probability and statistics, covering basic probability, distributions, inference, regression, etc., suitable for beginners and those reviewing.

A tweet recommending Nathan Cantafio's blog post 'MLE is not intuitive', which discusses common misconceptions about Maximum Likelihood Estimation in an accessible way.

Uses the Bradley-Terry model and Elo rating system to statistically determine a dog's favorite treat through pairwise comparison experiments.

the-stats-duck v0.6.0 is an open-source DuckDB extension that brings statistical analysis and plotting directly into SQL, including regression, bootstrapping, and ggplot-like visualization.

This article reports on a study estimating the percentage of newly written code that is now generated or assisted by AI, highlighting the growing role of AI tools in software development.

The R Core team has been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in 2026, recognizing their contributions to statistical computing.

Analysis of multiple studies shows that social sharing buttons are rarely clicked (about 0.2% of visitors). Users instead copy and paste URLs, making 'dark social' a major traffic source.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has ordered a ban on noise infusion in all statistical products from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which could undermine differential privacy protections and statistical accuracy.

The article traces the widely cited '300% AI agent adoption surge' statistic to its source and finds that the data actually shows a near doubling of deployment intent, not actual production deployment, with only about 1 in 10 companies that deploy agents scaling them. It warns against using fabricated stats for planning.

Elon Musk tweets that Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised mode was over 3 times safer than manual driving on Dutch roads over the past two months.