We need statistical thinking, not statistical rituals

Do We Need Chinese Word Segmentation for Statistical Machine Translation?

In Chinese texts, words are not separated by white spaces. This is problematic for many natural language processing tasks. The standard approach is to segment the Chinese character sequence into words. Here, we investigate Chinese word segmentation for statistical machine translation. We pursue two goals: the first one is the maximization of the final translation quality; the second is the mini...

Rituals in antenatal care--do we need them?

Common Pitfalls in Statistical Thinking

works for quality management and process improvement, statistical thinking is an intrinsic part of building organizational capability. In all of these frameworks there is a degree of flexibility in how the statistical thinking concepts are implemented, because these frameworks apply to many different contexts. Flexibility, however, also leads to ambiguity and inconsistency. The purpose of this ...

Statistical Literacy and Mathematical Thinking

Statistical Literacy, the study of statistics as evidence in arguments, is proposed as a new course – a bridging course to better prepare students for the traditional statistics course. Statistical Literacy can also be a stand-alone course with its focus on observational studies and confounding factors. The mathematics involved in statistical inference of traditional statistics are reviewed. Ca...

Local and Global Thinking in Statistical Inference

In this reflective paper, we explore students’ local and global thinking about informal statistical inference through our observations of 10to 11-year-olds, challenged to infer the unknown configuration of a virtual die, but able to use the die to generate as much data as they felt necessary. We report how they tended to focus on local changes in the frequency or relative frequency as the sampl...