Perceiving the world through statistics: some dimensional thoughts, - Mines Saint-Étienne
Conference Papers Year : 2014

Perceiving the world through statistics: some dimensional thoughts,

Abstract

Using Abbott's Flatland novel as a metaphor, we will show that our understanding of the reality depends on our capacity to perceive the multiple dimensions of the world. Perceived reality is different for two-dimensional beings than for three-dimensional beings. We propose to develop an analogy with statistics: couldn't it be said that statistics is the art of trying to understand a high-dimensional world, by projecting it into reduced and intelligible subspaces? Consequently, different data collection strategies, different statistical methods, or different usages, may bring to different understandings of a single world. None of them are true, none of them are false. They are just different reduced perceptions of a complex and infinite-dimensional world. Their discrepancies may lead to complementary data gathering or statistical analysis.
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Dates and versions

emse-01038000 , version 1 (23-07-2014)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : emse-01038000 , version 1

Cite

Michel Lutz, Rodolphe Le Riche. Perceiving the world through statistics: some dimensional thoughts,. 14th Annual Conference of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS-14), Sep 2014, Linz, Austria. ⟨emse-01038000⟩
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