Keep Calm It’s Only Statistics

For statistics lovers and those who will become after reading this blog 🙂

The field of statistics is the science of learning from data. Statistics can be complicated, confusing, and complex, but that does not diminish their importance. It also can be exciting and fun. I will try to present it as something easy and fun.

The first time I encountered statistics was in high school. The classes were not more interesting to me. It seemed to me that they were just some calculation formulas, some guesses etc. Then I heard from friends who studied psychology that statistics is vital for them, and they learn it very highly. I was amazed that psychologists need statistics at all. And then, I confirmed to myself that statistics are not necessary for me. Ha-ha, what a wrong conclusion!

After reading many books, articles, and forums related to data, analytics and predictive analytics, of course, statistics (that I persistently wanted to skip), somehow it fell one name caught my eye: Nathaniel (Nate) Silver. Out of so many experts, his story was fascinating to me.

Nate Silver: The man who correctly predicted US elections.

He uses statistical analysis — complex numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics etc. For example, he could correctly predict how people would vote ahead of time.

That confused me since I thought he was primarily an ordinary poker player and writer. But besides it, he was also a statistician and the man behind the New York Times blog, FiveThirtyEight.com.

“Poker is an excellent training to give you a better intuition for the mathematics of probability,”
Nate Silver

He produced astonishing results. Election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S.

Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. Silver eventually published detailed forecasts and analyses of the results for all three sets of elections. Unfortunately, predictions in 2010 were not as accurate as those made in 2008.

But in 2012, he successfully predicted the presidential election and outcomes in 50 of the 50 states in the U.S. presidential election. In 2020, FiveThirtyEight predicted Joe Biden’s victory in the election, forecasting 48 out of 50 states accurately (only missed Florida and North Carolina). He becomes so popular that his blog reaches millions of views, and his name becomes viral, like “Keep calm and trust Nate Silver.“

Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, suggests that the actual value of forecasting the future won’t be found among the high-powered processors that populate the promised land of “Big Data”. Instead, Silver portrays forecasting we can use to grow closer to the truth. “The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves.”, “We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning,” he argues from the book’s outset. As a result, you can read the best use of data in various disciplines, from meteorology and epidemiology to baseball and poker. He argues that one advantage of Bayes’s way is that inviting us to make predictions even with imperfect data also forces us to make our biases visible. Also, he explains that long-time gamblers understand this process even when they do not understand the math.

Aaaand believe it or not thus, my love for statistics appeared.

If this affected at least one per cent to increase the probability of those who would like to learn statistics or those who already know statistics but read new exciting pieces of information, then my mission for today was successful.