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Re:Show your costs to boost sales by tdmckinlay on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:35AM (#26980954)
Thank you so much!

I agree that the figures can vary for many reasons and we shouldn't expect them to be exactly the same (some things we don't end up controlling for).

At the same time, if we take the experiment of the soup for example:

They measured 9,227 sales of it so the 21.1% increase is quite robust and I'd expect the error margin to be much lower than 5% either way - so in some ways the precision is warranted.

I also feel that if I were to round a 21.4% to 20% I'd be miscommunicating the findings of the research :)

Re:Show your costs to boost sales by lupire on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:58AM (#26981224)
You are confusing confidence intervals (used to say that you are confident the increase is positive at all) with error margin (the false precision in the 3rd significant figure).
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by tdmckinlay on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:09AM (#26981359)
You are right, my bad! Thanks for catching that in the comment above, I've updated it
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by vntok on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:05AM (#26981318)
That does not bode well for the rest of the methodology...
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by boomboomsubban on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:52PM (#26989063)
Mixing up terms in casual conversation happens to everyone, and is not a sign of a meaningful problem.
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by johnsmith4739 on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:59AM (#26982008)
I don't know why people downvote you:

//> we finally have an absolute number of sales measured, but no way of knowing - representing all sales within a period or just cherry picked?

//> for the rest of the population, did it reduced sales?

//> was there any randomised test or not, because in the latter case there could be other biases we're unaware of

//> the increase is compared to what exactly?

//> any WHY is purely speculative as what was measured was WHAT people did. Internal motivation is in this case unproven, there is just a potential correlation.

//> confuses me to hell people taking about error margins and confidence intervals for something measured directly.

Re:Show your costs to boost sales by rahimnathwani on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:28AM (#26981614)
"if I were to round a 21.4% to 20%"

Right, but you'd round 21.4% to 21%, not to 20%.

Re:Show your costs to boost sales by infogulch on Thursday April 29, 2021 @11:08AM (#26982139)
You're assuming that you can only round to the nearest 1% which is not true at all. If you round to the nearest confidence interval and the CI is 5% then you would round to 20%. That said, I would prefer both the precise number and CI communicated together like sibling comment mentions.
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by pushrax on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:45AM (#26981826)
Or ideally keep 21.4% and include the 95% CI. There’s nothing misleading about the extra precision when the CI is included.
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by yowlingcat on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:56AM (#26981976)
Agreed. Actually, I wish the norm was to communicate percentages with confidence intervals by default, because I feel like the tacit implication is colloquially "100% CI unless communicated otherwise."
Re:Show your costs to boost sales by shoto_io on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:48AM (#26981116)
Thanks for explaining! Your point about miscommunication makes a lot sense to me!