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Talk:Statistics/Basic: Difference between revisions
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:Which part of it looks like a challenge? You add up some numbers, then maybe divide by another number, it's not like there's tricky coding to be done. Large dataset is a real senario and not hard to deal with, as long as you don't artificially complicate it. And as sample size increases, numbers such as mean and stddev becomes stable, which is almost the whole point of statistics: it's an easily noticeable trend, I'm not asking you to find face of Jesus in the output numbers. As a programmer, none of these should be hard to understand, and I never said anything about greatly reducing errors: you can only avoid greatly <i>increasing</i> it, but that's natural requirement for anyone doing numerical work. --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 17:02, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
:: Making it numerically stable, that's challenging. It's easy enough if you have a small number of values of all about the same scale, but that's not always the case. –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 17:11, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
::: That's actually rarely a problem in the real world. If a distribution is narrow, scale difference is small; if distribution is wide, losing some precision on really small numbers wouldn't affect either average or stddev. It probably will be a concern only when you have a few very large numbers and a lot of smaller ones (say < 10^-16 relatively in abs, but about 10^16 in quantity), but what kind of physical measurement would give a distribution like that? In any event, I didn't say anything about that in the task; the distribution used is uniform, it really can't get much simpler than that. --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 17:35, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
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