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Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn by jschwartzi on Saturday January 10, 2015 @08:38AM (#8866735)
Can you actually automate statistical analysis like that? I don't mean automating the actual math, I mean writing software to process raw data, decide what the meaningful statistical computations are, and then present the information output appropriately.

As far as I'm aware doing probability and statistics correctly is all about framing the problem correctly. You can, for example, accidentally assume that two events are independent when they're really dependent. Is it even possible to detect that kind of mis-framing automatically?

Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn by turnip1979 on Saturday January 10, 2015 @04:17PM (#8867954)
Yes .. it is possible. I may be getting the name wrong but I saw a demo from Ben Shneiderman's research group a few years ago where they did every possible statistical analysis on pairs of variables to look for high correlation. To their credit, they weren't selling the idea as automatic stats analysis. Their domain was health data and they were merely stating that their tool could give scientists an insight as to what factors to look at. Still ... it made me wonder where this could go.