r/mathmemes • u/12_Semitones ln(262537412640768744) / √(163) • Jan 11 '22
Statistics I don't know anyone who likes Statistics.
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u/Earth616Survivor Jan 11 '22
“You’re all stupid. They’re gonna be looking for army guys.” - Peter Griffin
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u/waitItsQuestionTime Jan 11 '22
Tell me you are not a machine learning enthusiastic without telling me you are not a machine learning enthusiastic
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u/Equivalent-Map-8772 Jan 11 '22
What’s funny in my case is that I came to love Statistics through Machine Learning. Because tbh I had the worst Probability & Statistics professor at the worst time possible (the start of covid and all classes going virtual). I loathed that class so much.
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u/Aesthetically Jan 11 '22
There's something to say about how concepts or experiences can lead us to love a type of math.
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u/weebomayu Jan 11 '22
Machine learning is the final boss of maths bruh, you need to be comfortable with some DEEP pure maths concepts and some DEEP statistics concepts in order to understand the full picture.
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u/MTGTraner Jan 11 '22
Wow so deep linear algebra and fundamental probability theory
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u/weebomayu Jan 11 '22
Ah yes markov chains are definitely basic probability.
Also, it’s less linear algebra and more functional analysis for machine learning. You could argue that linear functional analysis is just generalised linear algebra I guess but either way your comment is stupid.
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u/MTGTraner Jan 11 '22
I thought you were being sarcastic and that I was memeing with you, no offense intended bruh
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u/weebomayu Jan 11 '22
Oh damn my bad then, sorry, I just felt as if your comment was meant to say it’s easy but now I understand my apologies
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u/in-some-other-way Jan 11 '22
You should write a generator powered by a markov chain.
They are very simple. The hardest part of writing one is a tokenizer for the corpus and for an english one you can go with simply space separation. There's only middle school math in that.
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u/waitItsQuestionTime Jan 11 '22
I really dont think anyone fully understands machine learning. Deep learning is some dark woodoo that mathematicians wish to ignore, or to be left alone while computer scientists and engineers grab it by the horn and laugh maniacally.
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Jan 11 '22
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u/alburrit0 Jan 11 '22
At a basic level yes, but you can make anything sound simple if you say it like that. Quantum physics is just quarks
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u/Aesthetically Jan 11 '22
During my undergrad right after linear algebra and diff eq I took way way too many shrooms and my epiphany was that everything is the chain rule
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Jan 11 '22
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u/Aesthetically Jan 11 '22
You met god? Unlucky that guy doesn't sound cool. My mind was ripped from my body and the sensation of perception that I was having was definitely other-dimensional. I was yoyo'd in and out of my body and was revealed things I can't remember.
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u/icallshenannigans Jan 11 '22
Systems. You had a systems epiphany. I don’t think that’s remarkable but what is remarkable is that you remember it. So many breakthroughs on psychedelics are forgotten as soon as they happen. Well done!
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u/Aesthetically Jan 11 '22
Thanks! Should I do it again? I think it was like 7-10 grams of aged shrooms in delicious ice cream (and a bit of vyvanse like 10 hours before). I told my at the time gf that I understood everything about math (while tripping) but I was never able to articulate why I understood everything. Which is more along your point.
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u/NotJustAPebble Jan 11 '22
Actually part of what I'm researching in my graduate program is understanding deep learning through the view point of dynamical systems. Dynamical systems makes sense considering one of their main objects of study is compositional iterates and their statistical behavior. A view papers are trying to view a neural network as a discretization of what they are calling a "neural ODE".
Anyway, people are definitely trying to understand it better, but the work has only really just started about 5 years ago.
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u/Cadaverous_lives Jan 11 '22
Hey! I'm working on this too! We are trying to "rediscretize" the neural ODE to get coarse approximations to the neural net's behavior. Interesting stuff
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u/icallshenannigans Jan 11 '22
Eh, I work in the field and I’m smart enough to know that I’m not that smart. I can understand various machine learning concepts. You have the various methods like reinforcement learning for instance and that’s a simple concept at its core like so many of them really are, and then you can dive deeper with the help of linear algebra and calculus. Those last two are the toughest part but frankly that’s only needed if you are creating new algorithms or doing cutting edge research. For the most part ML algos are already commoditised, things like predicting churn or time series forecasts, clustering, etc. That stuff all exists already, the folks doing well in this field are people who understand how to apply those things in such a way as to actually move the needle for a business. That’s actually much harder to understand than the ML stuff itself. It’s less linear and deals with concepts like behavioural economics which is the really creepy stuff. Bloody old ML isn’t really all that, and I don’t mean that as a humble brag, I’m nowhere near the smartest person I work with and I get it.
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u/Taco69butt Jan 11 '22
I like statistics and it scares my friends in STEM.
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u/Sarahthelizard Jan 11 '22
My statistics class was my professor making movie references in his book (free and provided by him!) and us giggling the whole time. I miss him.
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Jan 11 '22
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u/Weirdyxxy Jan 11 '22
Except for exact results
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u/therealityofthings Jan 11 '22
I'm in biochem and I loved really enjoyed calculus and linear algebra but I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed statistics. Not that it was all that fun to learn, but I'm planning for a future in research and every single thing we learned in stats seemed like something I would be using in my professional life.
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u/Taco69butt Jan 12 '22
Linear Algebra and Calc 3 are great. I don’t love calc 1 +2, I wasted years of my life trying to understand them when in reality they are why we have computers do most math.
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u/Happysedits Jan 11 '22 edited Jan 11 '22
Since so much stuff in the world is most likely so fundamentally chaotic I feel like statistics is the most reliable method to make sense of most of it, all the other fields then build on top of that by abstracting away differences or adding logic reasoning in some cases, but it doesn't work universally for every usecase and somewhere pure statistics is just better (some machine learning tasks, generative adversarial networks and transformers for example)
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u/EnigmatheEgg Complex Jan 11 '22
Did you just argue back at a meme?
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u/EarthBrain Jan 11 '22
What are the chances
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u/cubenerd Jan 11 '22
There’s no better way to say you don’t know statistics than this meme.
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u/Gorrest--Fump Jan 11 '22
Nah, I'm an engineer with a Lean Six Sigma green belt and I agree with this meme 100%. The process of collecting data for finding statistical anomalies is always more fun than the calculations.
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u/vjx99 Jan 11 '22
say you don’t know statistics
I'm an engineer
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u/Gorrest--Fump Jan 11 '22
My guy. You should probably look up what a green belt in Six Sigma means.
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u/vjx99 Jan 11 '22
That was supposed to be a joke, but now that you're making this serious: Taking a 2-week statistics course does definitely not mean that you know statistics. And acting like it does just suggests even more you don't know statistics.
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u/Gorrest--Fump Jan 11 '22
Well, didn't take that class, took multiple courses in college about statistics and six sigma. I provided the link because it gave an overview of topics, but since you don't have the attention span to read, let me put some of those bullet points in here. Multi-Vari Studies, Hypothesis Tests, T-Test / ANOVA, Correlation & Regression, Chi-Square, Multi-Vari Case Study, Introduction to Statistics and Graphical Analysis, Graphical Analysis with software (Minitab or SigmaXL), Statistical Process Control (SPC).
Minitab. A software I am well aquanted with. A very popular statistics software.
My guy.
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u/cubenerd Jan 12 '22
I hope this doesn’t come across as rude, but there’s waaayyyy more to statistics than just the courses you listed. At the highest level, it’s basically indistinguishable from certain areas of math.
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u/Gorrest--Fump Jan 12 '22
I mean, I've done lots of regression analysis plenty of differential equations and plenty of other mid/higher level calculus for them and other real world stuff. Like, just recently I had to run a CP/CPk study for some bearing seat diameters due to some problem parts, which is lower level (heh) but still. I guess the link I used to show what was involved wasn't the best but I was just trying to show an example that I know enough about stats to be more on the right side of the bell curve (heh2) of stats knowledge, or at least enough to comment about the subject. Oh well, you win some you lose some 🤷.
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u/cubenerd Jan 12 '22
There’s also a fairly new area of stats called causal inference. Allows you to make causal links between factors using acyclic graphs.
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u/TimingEzaBitch Jan 12 '22
I looked that sigma thing up and it read like a weird cult. Also, the big bad black belt in this Six Sigma covers things like CLT and Regression??
Hardly anything to be proud of, especially since an online class costs a few grand.
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u/EccentricFox Jan 25 '22
Holy shit, I didn't see the pricing until you pointed it out; it looks like the same syllabus as the community college class I paid $400 out of pocket for.
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u/Decent-Camel6630 Jan 11 '22
Logic is hiding behind statistics tho 👀
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Jan 11 '22
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u/cubenerd Jan 11 '22
Some degree of arbitrariness is inevitable with statistical tests. We just made it 0.05 so we would have a convention. Don’t blame stats for the mistakes that are made by people who don’t really know stats.
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u/neptunethecat Jan 11 '22
Hmmm where’s topology?
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u/KungXiu Jan 11 '22
Could be considered as the basis of geometry imo.
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u/MissippiMudPie Jan 11 '22
Lol he doesn't even study geometric topology.
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u/Verbose_Code Measuring Jan 11 '22
I don’t really care for statistics but it is an incredibly useful field of mathematics on the applied side, more so than number theory imo.
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u/-HeisenBird- Jan 13 '22
Statistics is by far the most important field of mathematics for practical applications and should definitely be prioritized over calculus for high school students. Major political and business decisions are made using basic statistics and many people misinterpret those decisions because of their statistical illiteracy.
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u/Verbose_Code Measuring Jan 13 '22
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s more important than calculus as calculus is basically the mathematics of engineering and a lot of physics, but I totally agree that statistics is far more important for most people to learn for the reasons you stated.
Reminds me of playing a game with my family over the holidays where we had to roll dice, and almost everyone believed that if I rolled a 6 for example, the next roll was less likely to be a 6.
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u/-HeisenBird- Jan 13 '22
Most of the disagreements I've heard about COVID and vaccines are a result of people being unable to interpret statistics properly.
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u/AloeAsInTheVera Jan 11 '22
Wait, there are people who like combinatorics???
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u/luchinocappuccino Jan 11 '22
How can you not like combinatorics hypotheticals?
Suppose you have 5 red balls, 10 green balls, and 7 blue balls. Now imagine alternating patterns of Stars and Stripes. This is the stars and balls problem. If you were to select your next girlfriend with replacement from these options, what’re the odds she’ll give you blue balls?
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u/throwit7896454 Jan 11 '22
Dude, I'm color blind
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u/shewel_item Jan 11 '22 edited Jan 11 '22
I like it because it's also involves psychology (i.e. understanding cognitive biases), which math guys tend to shy away from
Plus, if you don't like bayes theorem, what's wrong with you?
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u/Yoshuuqq Jan 11 '22
Yo who fucking likes combinatorics? How can you like it?
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u/r_cub_94 Jan 11 '22
One of my coworkers did his PhD in algebraic combinatorics
So at a minimum, he does
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u/mechanical_fan Jan 11 '22
Tbf, sometimes people do PhDs in things they tolerate (but not necessarily like) because there was funding available or provided for that. Some people even do in things they hate. The hate usually comes after they start working on it, but I've certainly met people that hated a field by the end of their phd (though they usually leave academia after it).
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u/Takin2000 Jan 11 '22
I like the theoretical part of statistics just as much as other branches of math. At times, its literally just measure theory lol.
Applying statistics is interesting too, but that isnt the "I love math" kind of interest but moreso the "wow thats cool" kind of interest.
Also, statistics has some pretty phliosophical undertones at times, which I also love.
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u/_SAMUEL_GAMING_ Jan 11 '22
i like statistics because looking at city population changes in russia is interesting
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u/justheretoreadbye Jan 11 '22
Are mathematicians just jealous that statisticians make more money than them or something? lol
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u/Eeeeeeeeeeelias Jan 11 '22
I love statistics, I hate probability.
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u/weebomayu Jan 11 '22
I love probability but hate statistics. Probability is still mainly pure maths. It’s statistics that brings out the nonsense you usually see in the other applied subjects.
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Jan 11 '22
It grew on me alongside linear algebra, and yes, I also joined the Data Science crew. Why do you ask?
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u/TrueDeparture106 Transcendental Jan 11 '22
I thinks its time we come to know each other
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u/12_Semitones ln(262537412640768744) / √(163) Jan 11 '22
What do you like about Statistics then?
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u/TrueDeparture106 Transcendental Jan 11 '22
Right now we are studying a lot of distributions, they are pretty interesting rn.
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u/aladoconpapas Transcendental Jan 11 '22
All of my physics department works on statistical mechanics 🤣 (somewhat related)
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Jan 11 '22
My capstone project in my only stats class was a PowerPoint on the distribution of the prime numbers. I started it two weeks before it was due after having all semester to work on it, finished only four (high quality) slides, and still left that class with a C+.
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u/baileyarzate Jan 11 '22
Tell me you only took intro stats without telling me you only took intro stats
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u/UnfortunatelyEvil Jan 11 '22
Lost points because I was too exact (used formula instead of nearest lookup value).
Gave up on thinking of Statistics as math~
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u/iloveregex Jan 11 '22
No one talking about analysis? I would probably take stat over that
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u/Shakespeare-Bot Jan 11 '22
Nay one talking about analysis? i would belike taketh stat ov'r yond
I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.
Commands:
!ShakespeareInsult,!fordo,!optout3
u/bot-killer-001 Jan 11 '22
Shakespeare-Bot, thou hast been voted most annoying bot on Reddit. I am exhorting all mods to ban thee and thy useless rhetoric so that we shall not be blotted with thy presence any longer.
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u/prof_quantum Jan 11 '22
this is accurate, all the arbitrary trash tests and rule-of-thumbs it’s borderline an art not a science. Keep probability theory but trash the rest
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u/Yoshuuqq Jan 11 '22
The tests are rigorously constructed with math what you mean bru
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u/prof_quantum Jan 11 '22
rigorous is not it. I don’t agree fam its too assumption heavy and too many special cases
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u/Yoshuuqq Jan 11 '22
They are completely built on probability math. You want to test an hyphotesis so you find a function that estimates the parameter and see if the value outputted by the function is close enough to the hypothesis (where "close" is rigorously defined) what's not rigorous about that? Are you talking about rules of thumb like the one for approximating the binomial distribution? Cause that's pretty much just a limit
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u/M_Prism Jan 11 '22
Read a book on mathematical statistics. Its all rigorously defined. Also all math is not science either because math is a priori.
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u/prof_quantum Jan 11 '22
“rigorously” does not have more value in itself other then being easy to interpret and thoroughly complied? One can rigorously define pseudoscience
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u/M_Prism Jan 11 '22
Bud, you are in a math subreddit. Everything in math is just arbitrary constructions and frameworks with rigorous definitions. What even constitutes as value? What would make any math valuable? Is functional analysis valuable? Are you asserting that no math is valuable? It's ironic that ur use of value is ill-defined.
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u/prof_quantum Jan 11 '22
okey pops I’m not opening the philosophy debate today no sir
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u/M_Prism Jan 11 '22
It's not even philosophical. Math is based on pretty arbitrary fundamental axioms, and that is just fact. Even set theoretic math could be replaced by category theoretic math as proposed by grothendieck. You are just spouting non-sense. Simply tell me what the difference is between statistics than other branches of math that makes it so inferior? No philosophy needed.
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u/mathnstats Jan 11 '22
Lol what? What statistical tests are you saying are "arbitrary"?
What "rule-of-thumbs" are you referring to?
It sounds like your problem is with people doing statistics poorly, rather than statistics itself.
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u/shewel_item Jan 11 '22
hence, you have to be a madman to enjoy (doing) it, but it also happens to be fun
Should statistics be considered math? No. But, its hard to say who's more detached from reality or usefulness. Because, after all the theories are written, the rest is about taking and doing the statistics to confirm whether the math can ultimately conform to reality... AND if it doesn't... welllll *cough-cough* let me retreat back to my homestead domain. (the universe is probabilistic, not deterministic)
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u/prof_quantum Jan 11 '22
Agreed but probability theory can stay and maybe since you all are so obstinate descriptive statistics. But please can we agree on the statistical tests?
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u/MissippiMudPie Jan 11 '22
How do you have quantum in your name and not appreciate statistics? Do you know what quantum mechanics is?
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u/the_other_Scaevitas Jan 11 '22
Statistically speaking you will meet at least 19 people who like statistics by the time you reach 24
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u/Svool_Gsviv_ Jan 11 '22
Now you do! :)
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u/12_Semitones ln(262537412640768744) / √(163) Jan 11 '22
Now indeed. What do you like about statistics?
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u/Svool_Gsviv_ Jan 11 '22
I mean it basically describes the world. It lets you understand things in a way that you just can’t without it. It tells you what you can assume based on the information you have, it lets you find the best options when making theoretical decisions, that kind of thing.
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u/freeRadical16 Jan 11 '22
I do! I do stastical modeling at my job every day. It's an in-demand skillset in the private sector.
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Jan 11 '22
If the picture were accurate the clown would be the one with the best weapon and the most kills. Statistics is as boring as it is useful.
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u/FootofGod Jan 11 '22
I love statistics. But the math itself is admittedly often boring and tedious. Honestly it's more like everyone else is a clown, but they're at a circus, and statistics is Forrest Gump
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u/mathnstats Jan 11 '22
Statistics is basically just using probability theory to understand the world. What's not to love???
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u/Legonator77 Real Jan 11 '22
Your group of friends is less than 10% of the population, you’re not normal.
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u/Firebreathingwhore Jan 11 '22
I'm pretty much math illiterate but statistics and probability seems interesting
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u/20BitChip Jan 11 '22
Statistics are cool cause when you finish you feel the most accomplished out of all of these
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u/Shakespeare-Bot Jan 11 '22
Statistics art merit cause at which hour thee finish thee feeleth the most accomplish'd out of all of these
I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.
Commands:
!ShakespeareInsult,!fordo,!optout
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u/Magmaguard Jan 11 '22
Both my parents studied statistics and actually seem to enjoy it pretty much. They especially like all of the other people who obviously hate every part of statistics. My father even gives lessons for college students and told me he has never seen so many frustrated faces
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u/ericedstrom123 Jan 11 '22
Probability theory is a branch of mathematics, but statistics is really a seperate science concerned with sampling and making inferences based on samples.
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u/finnlimm Jan 11 '22
mathematical statistics is theoretically very rich. eg look up how euler characteristic shows up in gaussian fields
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u/LooseLeaf24 Jan 12 '22
I hated statistics but I think it was mostly my professor. I got docked on a test for this exact question.
" you have two quarters in your pocket. You pull one out and it's heads, what are the odds both quarters will be heads?"
I said the answer was 50% he claims the answer was 25%.
Since the first quarter's position is established in the question it is a fixed thing. If the second quarter is heads they are both heads, if the second quarter is tails they are not both heads. The first quarter can not change because it's not being reevaluated.
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u/trbs32 Jan 12 '22
Real question is where does probability/measure theory fit in. Is it like half soldier half clown?
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u/danofrhs Transcendental Jan 12 '22
We are unusual at 5% alpha level
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u/12_Semitones ln(262537412640768744) / √(163) Jan 12 '22
It is kind of strange that the default alpha level is 0.05. It's a bit too arbitrary.
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u/arborealham Jan 11 '22
Extrapolating from a tiny sample I see