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	<title>Comments on: What is a Statistic?</title>
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		<title>By: isomorphismes</title>
		<link>http://www.arsmathematica.net/2008/11/01/what-is-a-statistic/#comment-69797</link>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[isomorphismes]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2013 06:47:24 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Sure, so it&#039;s something that takes as an input N data and gives as output 1 number. That&#039;s not so uninteresting since it means we&#039;re not getting an &quot;interesting&quot; structure as an output, and since N &#8594; 1 we&#039;re reducing a lot of detail.

Most statistic-s are some kind of integral, no? Or at least they pass through an integrator as well as perhaps other things happening at the same time. So that&#039;s another way of saying what &quot;a statistic&quot; is in fancier terms. I believe the word &quot;operator&quot; holds the same meaning in QM.

To tantalise the computer people you can use the word &quot;reduce&quot; (with perhaps a &quot;map&quot; beforehand). Not so totally meaningless. One takeaway for example is that the mean income of a country, or the mean economic return on a PhD, may not be relevant to you if either [a] you aren&#039;t a member of some important subset (whites, let&#039;s say in the US if we&#039;re discussing US wealth--or numerical methods PhD&#039;s if we&#039;re discussing economic returns on a mathematics degree) or [b] more statistic-s such as skew or variance are high enough to make the first moment less informative as the only number.


PS: I think you could also compute a statistic on a probability distribution. I believe you are thinking of an estimator that gets computed only on measurements of our world.]]></description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Sure, so it&#8217;s something that takes as an input N data and gives as output 1 number. That&#8217;s not so uninteresting since it means we&#8217;re not getting an &#8220;interesting&#8221; structure as an output, and since N &rarr; 1 we&#8217;re reducing a lot of detail.</p>
<p>Most statistic-s are some kind of integral, no? Or at least they pass through an integrator as well as perhaps other things happening at the same time. So that&#8217;s another way of saying what &#8220;a statistic&#8221; is in fancier terms. I believe the word &#8220;operator&#8221; holds the same meaning in QM.</p>
<p>To tantalise the computer people you can use the word &#8220;reduce&#8221; (with perhaps a &#8220;map&#8221; beforehand). Not so totally meaningless. One takeaway for example is that the mean income of a country, or the mean economic return on a PhD, may not be relevant to you if either [a] you aren&#8217;t a member of some important subset (whites, let&#8217;s say in the US if we&#8217;re discussing US wealth&#8211;or numerical methods PhD&#8217;s if we&#8217;re discussing economic returns on a mathematics degree) or [b] more statistic-s such as skew or variance are high enough to make the first moment less informative as the only number.</p>
<p>PS: I think you could also compute a statistic on a probability distribution. I believe you are thinking of an estimator that gets computed only on measurements of our world.</p>
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