Correlation doesn't imply causation. You've probably heard that before. It's a true statement that's important in statistical analysis—if more tall people own cats, that doesn't mean that cats cause ...

There’s an old saying that goes, “figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” But sometimes even the figures can spin a confusing story. That’s why I’ve always appreciated the power of understanding ...

Kwon is a Ph.D. student in health policy at Harvard University. Stuart is professor and chair in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It is human ...

Correctly distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical because it influences how treatments for illnesses are devised and tested. Also, in the context of the law, it ensures that as ...

The rooster thinks he summons the sun because the sunrise always follows his crow. Correlation, at its worst, is a very confident rooster. For decades, our data economy has run on the same illusion: ...

Shark attacks and ice cream sales follow the very same trajectory when charted. When ice cream sales go up, so do shark attacks. When ice cream sales decrease, shark attacks decrease. With a ...

Paul Kaplan: Quoting Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain famously quipped, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In the field of investments, in which we rely heavily on ...

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. – T. Sowell Correlations are often mistaken for ...

After reading Dalton Conley’s piece on recent developments in social-science research (“The Data in Your Lap: How to Interpret Naturally Occurring Experiments,” The Review, December 19), I can only ...