In the modern world, we’re awash in statistics and it’s interesting how they sometimes contradict each other. In this season, polls are an obvious example. They seldom agree and sometimes, as in the case of Brexit, they can be spectacularly wrong.
The real world is complicated and there are many ways to look at the data. An approach can be valid for certain cases, but less so for others. This is why it’s so important to explain your methods and calculations.
We’ve talked before about the statistics we use in the XPRTs. There are a set of white papers that describe how the tests work and how we perform the calculations. If you’re interested, a great place to start is the WebXPRT 2013 results calculation and confidence interval white paper, which describes the statistics in detail and links to a spreadsheet with a detailed example.
Any methodology can be improved, so if you have any ideas, let us know!
Eric
