re: Calling stats nerds...

quote:

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WARNING:::: NERD DISCUSSION
I teach a very basic intro to epidemiology and stats (for a long time but I always try to improve it year to year) course at my school. I will be explaining p-value concept and its misinterpretations... one of which is that its the probability that the findings are due to chance. But thats not technically correct.

A point I made during this discussion is that chance and random variation are not the same, though they seem so. Students say whats the difference. THis is what I have come up with after reading alot of different theories...Chance is a mathematical term whereas random variation is noise in the system or random error that can’t be predicted mathematically. Chance can be mathematically calculated.

How far off am it in this?

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for your purposes in this context... randomness (random variation) are the outcomes with a value outside the scope of predictions for that p-value.

chance is a prediction. randomness is unpredictable.