Five Data Points Can Clinch a Business Case [article]

Pop quiz: which of the following statements about decisions do you agree with:

  1. You need at least thirty data points to get a statistically significant result.
  2. One data point tells you nothing.
  3. In a business decision, the monetary value of data is more important than its statistical significance.
  4. If you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.

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Bayesian vs. Frequentist?

Under the Errata forum in a thread I called Second Print Run Corrections , one poster replied that he believed I incorrectly applied the term confidence interval in the book. I discuss several errors in that post in a reply in that thread. But it introduces another point of confusion apparently held by some about the difference between Bayesian vs. non-Bayesian methods in statistics and the epistemicologicaly philosophy debate of the frequentist vs. the subjectivist. I addressed it in another thread called Bayesian vs. Frequentist in this In the Clouds forum topic.