Category: Statistics

Posts about statistics

Parrondo’s Paradox in Finance: Combine two Losing Investments into a Winner


Wikipedia defines Parrondo’s paradox in game theory as

A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy.

If you want to learn more about this fascinating topic and see an application in finance, read on!
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Pseudo-Randomness: Creating Fake Noise


In data science, we try to find, sometimes well-hidden, patterns (= signal) in often seemingly random data (= noise). Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNG) try to do the opposite: hiding a deterministic data generating process (= signal) by making it look like randomness (= noise). If you want to understand some basics behind the scenes of this fascinating topic, read on!
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How to be Successful! The Role of Risk-taking: A Simulation Study


When you ask successful people for their advice on how to become successful you will often hear that you have to take risks, often huge risks.

In this post we will examine whether this is good advice with a simple multi-agent simulation, so read on!
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Create Return Triangle Plots with R


How lucrative stocks are in the long run is not only dependent on the length of the investment period but even more on the actual date the investment starts and ends!

Return Triangle Plots are a great way to visualize this phenomenon. If you want to learn more about them and how to create them with R read on!
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COVID-19 vaccine “95% effective”: It doesn’t mean what you think it means!


COVID-19 has the world more than ever in its grip – but there is hope: several vaccines have been developed which promise to deliver “95% efficacy”.

When people read this many assume that it means that 95% of vaccinated persons will be protected from infection – but that is not true. Even many (science) journalists get it wrong! If you want to understand what it really means, read on!
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OneR in Medical Research: Finding Leading Symptoms, Main Predictors and Cut-Off Points


We already had a lot of examples that make use of the OneR package (install free from CRAN), which can be found in the respective Category: OneR.

Here we will give you some concrete examples from the area of research on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (DM) to show that the package is especially well suited in the field of medical research, so read on!
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Logistic Regression as the Smallest Possible Neural Network


We already covered Neural Networks and Logistic Regression in this blog.

If you want to gain an even deeper understanding of the fascinating connection between those two popular machine learning techniques read on!
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How to Catch a Thief: Unmasking Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme with Benford’s Law

One of my starting points into quantitative finance was Bernie Madoff’s fund. Back then because Bernie was in desperate need of money to keep his Ponzi scheme running there existed several so-called feeder funds.

One of them happened to approach me to offer me a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. Or so it seemed. Now, there is this old saying that when something seems too good to be true it probably is. If you want to learn what Benford’s law is and how to apply it to uncover fraud, read on!
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The Central Limit Theorem (CLT): From Perfect Symmetry to the Normal Distribution


How can the Normal Distribution arise out of a completely symmetric set-up? The so-called Central Limit Theorem (CLT) is a fascinating example that demonstrates such behaviour. If you want to get some intuition on what lies at the core of many statistical tests, read on!
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