Weeks 11-12: Uses and Abuses – ARG

Name: Colina, Jhana Louise B. Date: December, 05, 2020

Section: TM 101 Score:

Instructions:

What are the uses and abuses of Statistics in the real world? Give specific examples
and provide pieces of evidence. Upload your work here in the dropbox.

Uses and Abuses of Statistics in the real world

Math is a big part of all of our lives especially statistics. Statistics is the branch of
mathematics which we use to analyze what is happening in the world around us.
Statistics is the collection of data and its representation. Statistics compare data through
mean, median and mode. We all have heard that we live in the information age where
we deal about the world around us. Most of the information is determined mathematically
using statistics. The Statistics is used to organize, summarize, present, and/or analyse
data -- often with the intent of approximating the behaviour of a population through
examination of samples taken from that population; testing hypotheses; determining
relationships between variables; and making predictions from existing data. There are
some of the examples to explain the role of statistic in real life.

Uses of Statistics in our daily life- specific examples and provide pieces of
evidence:

1) Medical Study

Statistics are used behind all the medical study. Statistic help doctors keep track of
where the baby should be in his/her mental development. Physician’s also uses statistics
to examine the effectiveness of treatments.
2) Weather Forecasts

Statistics are very important for observation, analysis and mathematical prediction
models. Weather Forecasts models are built using statistics that compare prior weather
conditions with current weather to forecast future weather conditions. Have you ever
seen weather forecasting? Do you know how the government does the weather
forecasting? Statistics play a crucial role in weather forecasting.

The computer use in weather forecasting is based on the set of statistics functions. All
these statistics function to compare the weather condition with the pre-recorded
seasons and conditions. This helps the government.

3) Quality Testing

A company makes thousands of products every day and make sure that they sold the
best quality items. For a company it is not possible to test each product. So the company
uses quality test with the help of statistics. Quality testing is another important use of
statistics in every area of life. On a day-to-day basis, we conduct quality tests to ensure
that our purchase is correct and get the best results from what we spend.

We do a sample test of what we expect to buy to get the best. If the sample test that we
have done passes the quality test, we want to buy it.

4) Stock Market

The stock market also uses statistical computer models for stock analysis. Stock
analysts get the information about economy using statistics concepts.

5) Consumer Goods

Retailers keeps track of everything they sell and to know the stock using statistics.
Worldwide leading retailers use statistics to calculate what products ship to each store
and when. Statistics are widely used in consumer goods products. The reason is
consumer goods are daily used products. The business use statistics to calculate which
consumer goods are available in the store or not. They also used stats to find out which
store needs the consumer goods and when to ship the products. Even proper statistics
decisions are helping the business to make massive revenue on consumer goods.

The Statistics are an important part of our lives. Help your children with statistics world
problem so that they will understand the real life role of statistics. With the help of
statistics we can know what happened in the past and what may occur in the future.

6.) Predictions

The figures help us make predictions about something that is going to happen in the
future. Based on what we face in our daily lives, we make predictions.

How accurate this prediction will depend on many factors. When we make a prediction,
we take into account the external or internal factors that may affect our future. When
they apply statistical techniques to estimate an event, the same statisticians use it.

Doctors, engineers, artists, and practitioners all use statistics to make predictions about
future events. For example, doctors use statistics to understand the future of the
disease. They can predict the magnitude of the flue in each winter season through the
use of data.

Engineers use statistics to estimate the success of their on-going project, and they also
use the data to evaluate how long it will take to complete a project.
7.) Emergency Preparedness
Statistics is also helpful in emergency preparedness. With the help of statistics, we can
predict any natural disaster that may happen shortly. It will help us to get prepared for
an emergency. It also helps the rescue team to do the preparation to rescue the life of
the people who are in danger.

8.) Predicting Disease

Statistics is even playing a role in the medical field. Statistics help us to know how many
numbers of people are suffering from the disease. It also helps us to understand how
many have died from the same disease.

But the best part of statistics is that it also helps you to find out how much you affected
from the deceased. For example, a study has shown that more than 75% of people are
infected with a disease that is caused by mango. In that case, you might avoid mango to
avoid this disease.

9.) Political Campaigns

Statistics are crucial in a political campaign. Without statistics, no one can run a political
campaign with perfection. It helps the politicians to have an idea about how many
chances they have to win an election in a particular area.

Statistics also help the news channel to predict the winner of the election. It also helps
the political parties to know how many candidates are in their support in a particular
voting zone. In contrast, it helps the country to predict the future government.
10.) Insurance
Insurance is a vast industry. There are hundreds of insurance i.e. car insurance, bike,
life insurance, and many more. The premium of insurance is based on the statistics.
Insurance companies use the statistics that are collected from various homeowners,
drivers, vehicle registration office, and many more. They receive the data from all these
resources and then decide the premium amount.

11.) Financial Market

The financial market completely relies on the financial market. All the stock prices
calculate with the help of statistics. It also helps the investor to take the decision of
investment in the particular stock. It also helps the corporate to manage their finance to
do long term business.

12.) Sports

There are lots of uses of statistics in sports. Every sport requires statistics to make the
sport more effective. Statistics help the sport person to get the idea about his/her
performance in the particular sports.

Nowadays sports are utilizing the statistics data into the next level. However the reason
is a sport is getting more popular and there are various kinds of types of equipment in
the sports that are used to collect data of various factors. Statistics is used to get a
conclusion from the given data.

13.) Business Statistics

Each large organization uses business statistics and utilizes various data analysis tools.
For instance, approximating the probability and see where sales can be headed in the
future. Several tools are used for business statistics, which built on the bases of mean,
median, and mode, the bell curve, and bar graphs, and basic probability. These can be
employed for research problems related to employees, products, customer service, and
much more. Business can successfully rely on the things what is working and what is
not.

Besides this, statistics are widely used in consumer goods products. The reason is
consumer goods are daily used products. The business use statistics to calculate which
consumer goods are available in the store or not.

They also used stats to find out which store needs the consumer goods and when to
ship the products. Even proper statistics decisions are helping the business to make
massive revenue on consumer goods.

14.) Research
The uses of statistics in research play an essential role in the work of researchers. For
instance, statistics can be applied in data acquisition, analysis, explanation,
interpretation, and presentation. The uses of statistics in research can lead
researchers for summarization, proper characterization, performance, and description of
the outcome of the research. Besides this, the medical area would be less effective
without the research to recognize which drugs or interventions run best and how the
individual groups respond to medicine. Medical experts also conduct studies by age,
race, or country to identify the effect of the features on one’s health.

15.) Education

The beneficial uses of statistics in education are that teachers can be considered to be
supportive as researchers during their classrooms to recognize what education
technique works on which pupils and know the reason why. They also need to estimate
test details to determine whether students are working expectedly, statistically, or not.
There are statistical studies about student achievement at all levels of testing and
education, from kindergarten to a GRE or SAT.

16.) Government

The importance of statistics in government is utilized by making judgments about health,

populations, education, and much more. It may help the government to check out what
education schedule can be beneficial for students. What is the progress report of high
school students using that particular curriculum? The government can assemble
specific data about the population of the country using a census.

17.) Economics

There are various applications of statistics in economics. Economists often practice the
statistics for a median to explain wages or housing prices in an area. For instance, let
the median salary in China is almost $65,000, which means half the individual in China
can earn less than $65,000, and the other half are earning more than $65,000. You
might be thinking, why do economists use the median? Why not use the mean for it?
Why not use the mode? It is because the median can be utilized for a large data value

18.) Computer Science

Statistics is essential for all sections of science, as it is amazingly beneficial for decision
making and examining the correctness of the choices that one has made. With the
application of statistics in computer science and machine learning, algorithms’ efficiency
can be increased significantly. One also can reduce the price of processing with the
help of statistics. If one does not understand statistics, it is not possible to know the
logical algorithms and find it challenging to develop them.
Computer scientists need to concentrate on retrieval, reporting, data
acquisition/cleaning, and mining. They are assigned to the algorithms’ improvement and
systems efficiency. Besides this, they focus on machine learning, especially data mining
(discovering models and relationships in information for several objectives, like finance
and marketing).

19.) Robotics

Statistics has various uses in the field of robotics. Various techniques can be applied in
this field, such as EM, Particle filters, Kalman filters, Bayesian networks, and much
more. The robot always senses the present state by estimating the probability density
function value. With the help of new input sensory, the robots continuously update
themselves and give priority to the current actions. Apart from this, robots can compare
the estimated and actual value and act as per the value. Therefore, it can be stated that
statistics is an important parameter that is used in robotics.

20.) Aerospace

Statistics is one of the important parameters on which aerospace engineering works.

There are numerous ways in which statistics are easily implemented, such as details
about shrinkage and growth rate for a route. Apart from this, statistics are used to study
traffic decline and growth, the number of accidents due to aerospace failures, etc.
Several airline industries use these statistics information to check how they can work to
make a better aerospace future.

21.) Data Science

A data scientist uses different statistical techniques to study the collected data, such as
Classification, Hypothesis testing, Regression, Time series analysis, and much more.
Data scientists do proper experiments and get desired results using these statistical
techniques. Besides all this, statistics can be utilized for concluding the information
quickly and effectively. Therefore, statistics is one of the helpful measures for data
scientists to obtain the relevant outputs of the sample space.

22.) Machine Learning

Statistics are utilized for quantifying the uncertainty of the estimated skills within the
machine learning models. These uncertainties are defined with the help of confidence
intervals and tolerance intervals. Statistics can be used for machine learning in various
ways, such as for: Problem Framing, Data Understanding, Data Cleaning, Data
Selection, Data Preparation, Model Evaluation, Model Configuration, Model Selection,
Model Presentation and Model Prediction.

23.) Deep Learning

Statistics and probability both are considered as the method of handling the aggregation
or ignorance of data. Deep learning can use statistics to get knowledge about
abstracting several useful properties and ignorance of the details. Therefore, it can be
seen that statistics and probability are the methods to formalize the deep learning
process mathematically. That is why this can be concluded that statistics are basic for
deep learning, and it would be better to understand the use of statistics in deep learning
and know it.

Abuses of Statistics in our real world- specific examples and provide pieces of
evidence:

Statistics, when used in a misleading fashion, can trick the casual observer into
believing something other than what the data shows. That is, a misuse of
statistics occurs when a statistical argument asserts a falsehood. In some cases, the
misuse may be accidental. In others, it is purposeful and for the gain of the perpetrator.
When the statistical reason involved is false or misapplied, this constitutes
a statistical fallacy.

The false statistics trap can be quite damaging for the quest for knowledge. For
example, in medical science, correcting a falsehood may take decades and cost lives.

Misuses can be easy to fall into. Professional scientists, even mathematicians and
professional statisticians, can be fooled by even some simple methods, even if they are
careful to check everything. Scientists have been known to fool themselves with
statistics due to lack of knowledge of probability theory and lack of standardization of
their tests.

Types of misuse

Discarding unfavourable observations

All a company has to do to promote a neutral (useless) product is to find or conduct, for
example, 40 studies with a confidence level of 95%. If the product is really useless, this
would on average produce one study showing the product was beneficial, one study
showing it was harmful and thirty-eight inconclusive studies (38 is 95% of 40). This
tactic becomes more effective the more studies there are available. Organizations that
do not publish every study they carry out, such as tobacco companies denying a link
between smoking and cancer, anti-smoking advocacy groups and media outlets trying
to prove a link between smoking’s and various ailments, or miracle pill vendors, are
likely to use this tactic.

Ronald Fisher considered this issue in his famous lady tasting tea example experiment
(from his 1935 book, The Design of Experiments). Regarding repeated experiments he
said, "It would clearly be illegitimate, and would rob our calculation of its basis, if
unsuccessful results were not all brought into the account." Another term related to this
concept is cherry picking.

Ignoring important features

Multivariable datasets have two or more features/dimensions. If too few of these
features are chosen for analysis (for example, if just one feature is chosen and simple
linear regression is performed instead of multiple linear regression), the results can be
misleading. This leaves the analyst vulnerable to any of various statistical paradoxes, or
in some (not all) cases false causality as below.

Loaded questions

The answers to surveys can often be manipulated by wording the question in such a
way as to induce prevalence towards a certain answer from the respondent. For
example, in polling support for a war, the questions:

Do you support the attempt by the US to bring freedom and democracy to other places
in the world?

Do you support the unprovoked military action by the USA? It will likely result in data
skewed in different directions, although they are both polling about the support for the
war. A better way of wording the question could be "Do you support the current US
military action abroad?" A still more nearly neutral way to put that question is "What is
your view about the current US military action abroad?" The point should be that the
person being asked has no way of guessing from the wording what the questioner might
want to hear.

Another way to do this is to precede the question by information that supports the
"desired" answer. For example, more people will likely answer "yes" to the question
"Given the increasing burden of taxes on middle-class families, do you support cuts in
income tax?" than to the question "Considering the rising federal budget deficit and the
desperate need for more revenue, do you support cuts in income tax?"

The proper formulation of questions can be very subtle. The responses to two questions
can vary dramatically depending on the order in which they are asked.[17] "A survey
that asked about 'ownership of stock' found that most Texas ranchers owned stock,
though probably not the kind traded on the New York Stock Exchange."[18]
Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is a fallacy occurring when a statistic about a particular population is

asserted to hold among members of a group for which the original population is not a
representative sample.

For example, suppose 100% of apples are observed to be red in summer. The assertion
"All apples are red" would be an instance of overgeneralization because the original
statistic was true only of a specific subset of apples (those in summer), which is not
expected to be representative of the population of apples as a whole.

A real-world example of the overgeneralization fallacy can be observed as an artefact of

modern polling techniques, which prohibit calling cell phones for over-the-phone political
polls. As young people are more likely than other demographic groups to lack a
conventional "landline" phone, a telephone poll that exclusively surveys responders of
calls landline phones, may cause the poll results to under sample the views of young
people, if no other measures are taken to account for this skewing of the sampling.
Thus, a poll examining the voting preferences of young people using this technique may
not be a perfectly accurate representation of young peoples' true voting preferences as
a whole without overgeneralizing, because the sample used excludes young people that
carry only cell phones, who may or may not have voting preferences that differ from the
rest of the population.

Overgeneralization often occurs when information is passed through nontechnical

sources, in particular mass media.

Biased samples

Scientists have learned at great cost that gathering good experimental data for
statistical analysis is difficult. Example: The placebo effect (mind over body) is very
powerful. 100% of subjects developed a rash when exposed to an inert substance that
was falsely called poison ivy while few developed a rash to a "harmless" object that
really was poison ivy.[19] Researchers combat this effect by double-blind randomized
comparative experiments. Statisticians typically worry more about the validity of the data
than the analysis. This is reflected in a field of study within statistics known as the
design of experiments.

Pollsters have learned at great cost that gathering good survey data for statistical
analysis is difficult. The selective effect of cellular telephones on data collection
(discussed in the Overgeneralization section) is one potential example; If young people
with traditional telephones are not representative, the sample can be biased. Sample
surveys have many pitfalls and require great care in execution.[20] One effort required
almost 3000 telephone calls to get 1000 answers. The simple random sample of the
population "isn't simple and may not be random."[21]

Misreporting or misunderstanding of estimated error

If a research team wants to know how 300 million people feel about a certain topic, it
would be impractical to ask all of them. However, if the team picks a random sample of
about 1000 people, they can be fairly certain that the results given by this group are
representative of what the larger group would have said if they had all been asked.

People may assume, because the confidence figure is omitted, that there is a 100%
certainty that the true result is within the estimated error. This is not mathematically
correct.

Many people may not realize that the randomness of the sample is very important. In
practice, many opinion polls are conducted by phone, which distorts the sample in
several ways, including exclusion of people who do not have phones, favoring the
inclusion of people who have more than one phone, favoring the inclusion of people
who are willing to participate in a phone survey over those who refuse, etc. Non-random
sampling makes the estimated error unreliable.
On the other hand, people may consider that statistics are inherently unreliable because
not everybody is called, or because they themselves are never polled. People may think
that it is impossible to get data on the opinion of dozens of millions of people by just
polling a few thousands. This is also inaccurate.[a] A poll with perfect unbiased
sampling and truthful answers has a mathematically determined margin of error, which
only depends on the number of people polled.

Data dredging

Data dredging is an abuse of data mining. In data dredging, large compilations of data
are examined in order to find a correlation, without any pre-defined choice of a
hypothesis to be tested. Since the required confidence interval to establish a
relationship between two parameters is usually chosen to be 95% (meaning that there is
a 95% chance that the relationship observed is not due to random chance), there is thus
a 5% chance of finding a correlation between any two sets of completely random
variables. Given that data dredging efforts typically examine large datasets with many
variables, and hence even larger numbers of pairs of variables, spurious but apparently
statistically significant results are almost certain to be found by any such study.

Note that data dredging is a valid way of finding a possible hypothesis but that
hypothesis must then be tested with data not used in the original dredging. The misuse
comes in when that hypothesis is stated as fact without further validation.

Data manipulation

Not to be confused with Data processing, Data preparation, or Data wrangling,

overlapping terms which are often referred to generally as "data manipulation".

Informally called "fudging the data," this practice includes selective reporting (see also
publication bias) and even simply making up false data.
Examples of selective reporting abound. The easiest and most common examples
involve choosing a group of results that follow a pattern consistent with the preferred
hypothesis while ignoring other results or "data runs" that contradict the hypothesis.

In additional of abuse of statistics:

However, statistics can be abused too. The following lists some ways in which this
frequently happens:

 Quoting statistics based on non-representative samples

 Choosing the "average" value for a sample which most lends itself to your
position, when a different "average" value would be more appropriate
 Speaking of changes in a variable in terms of actual values or percentages to
either inflate or deflate their importance psychologically. (How happy would you
be if your net worth increased by $10,000,000. What if that only represented a
0.3% increase?)
 Using detached statistics like "1/3 fewer carbs" (fewer than what?)
 Implying causal connections between variables without a well-designed
experiment to back it up (i.e., "Doctors say that taking lipotrim twice a day ''may
reduce'' your weight by up to 30 lbs in the first 2 weeks!")
 Formatting graphs to mislead the eye
 Designing questions to be used on a survey that will bias the results

The phrase Uses and Abuses of Statistics refers to the notion that in some cases
statistical results may be used as evidence to seemingly opposite these. However, most
of the time, common principles of logic allow us to disambiguate the obtained statistical
inference.