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On the Hunt for Patterns: from Hippocrates to Supercomputers

Ontotext

Ever since Hippocrates founded his school of medicine in ancient Greece some 2,500 years ago, writes Hannah Fry in her book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms , what has been fundamental to healthcare (as she calls it “the fight to keep us healthy”) was observation, experimentation and the analysis of data. Certainly not!

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Variance and significance in large-scale online services

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

Unlike experimentation in some other areas, LSOS experiments present a surprising challenge to statisticians — even though we operate in the realm of “big data”, the statistical uncertainty in our experiments can be substantial. We must therefore maintain statistical rigor in quantifying experimental uncertainty.

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LSOS experiments: how I learned to stop worrying and love the variability

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

Despite a very large number of experimental units, the experiments conducted by LSOS cannot presume statistical significance of all effects they deem practically significant. The result is that experimenters can’t afford to be sloppy about quantifying uncertainty. In statistics, such segments are often called “blocks” or “strata”.