The Rich didn’t earn their Wealth, they just got Lucky


Tomorrow, on the First of May, many countries celebrate the so called International Workers’ Day (or Labour Day): time to talk about the unequal distribution of wealth again, so read on!
Continue reading “The Rich didn’t earn their Wealth, they just got Lucky”

Google’s Eigenvector, or How a Random Surfer Finds the Most Relevant Webpages


Like most people, you will have used a search engine lately, like Google. But have you ever thought about how it manages to give you the most fitting results? How does it order the results so that the best are on top? Read on to find out!
Continue reading “Google’s Eigenvector, or How a Random Surfer Finds the Most Relevant Webpages”

Base Rate Fallacy – or why No One is justified to believe that Jesus rose


In this post we are talking about one of the most unintuitive results in statistics: the so called false positive paradox which is an example of the so called base rate fallacy. It describes a situation where a positive test result of a very sensitive medical test shows that you have the respective disease… yet you are most probably healthy!
Continue reading “Base Rate Fallacy – or why No One is justified to believe that Jesus rose”

Separating the Signal from the Noise: Robust Statistics for Pedestrians


One of the problems of navigating an autonomous car through a city is to extract robust signals in the face of all the noise that is present in the different sensors. Just taking something like an arithmetic mean of all the data points could possibly end in a catastrophe: if a part of a wall looks similar to the street and the algorithm calculates an average trajectory of the two this would end in leaving the road and possibly crashing into pedestrians. So we need some robust algorithm to get rid of the noise. The area of statistics that especially deals with such problems is called robust statistics and the methods used therein robust estimation.
Continue reading “Separating the Signal from the Noise: Robust Statistics for Pedestrians”

Symbolic Regression, Genetic Programming… or if Kepler had R


A few weeks ago we published a post about using the power of the evolutionary method for optimization (see Evolution works!). In this post we will go a step further, so read on…
Continue reading “Symbolic Regression, Genetic Programming… or if Kepler had R”