The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data (Pelican Books)

‘A statistical national treasure’ Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2

‘Required reading for all politicians, journalists, medics and anyone who tries to influence people (or is influenced) by statistics. A tour de force’ Popular Science

Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions – questions that can only be addressed using statistical science.

Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way statistical claims can be sensationalised, particularly in the media. In the age of big data, as data science becomes established as a discipline, a basic grasp of statistical literacy is more important than ever.

In The Art of Statistics, David Spiegelhalter guides the reader through the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Drawing on real world problems to introduce conceptual issues, he shows us how statistics can help us determine the luckiest passenger on the Titanic, whether serial killer Harold Shipman could have been caught earlier, and if screening for ovarian cancer is beneficial.

‘Shines a light on how we can use the ever-growing deluge of data to improve our understanding of the world’ Nature

From the Publisher

How can statistics help us understand the world?

An ambitious study conducted on over 4 million Swedish men and women whose tax and health records were linked over eighteen years enabled researchers to report that men with a higher socioeconomic position had a slightly increased rate of being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

But did all that sweating in the library overheat the brain and lead to some strange cell mutations? The authors of the paper doubted it: ‘Completeness of cancer registration and detection bias are potential explanations for the findings.’ In other words, wealthy people with higher education are more likely to be diagnosed and get their tumour registered, an example of ascertainment bias.

Plotting the responses from a recent UK survey revealed various features, including a (very) long tail, a tendency to use round numbers such as 10 and 20, and more partners reported by men than women. It is incredibly easy to just claim that what these respondents say accurately represents what is really going on in the country. Media surveys about sex, where people volunteer to say what they get up to behind closed doors, do this all the time.

An IARC report concluded that, normally, 6 in every 100 people who do not eat bacon daily would be expected to get bowel cancer. If 100 similar people ate a bacon sandwich every single day of their lives, the IARC would expect an 18% increase in cases of bowel cancer, i.e. a rise from 6 to 7 cases out of 100. That is one extra case in all those 100 lifetime bacon-eaters, which does not sound as impressive as the relative risk (an 18% increase) and might serve to put this hazard into perspective.

There is a considerable interest in the so- called ‘volume effect’ in surgery – the claim that busier hospitals get better survival rates, possibly since they achieve greater efficiency and have more experience.

When considering English hospitals conducting children’s heart surgery in the 1990s, and plotting the number of cases against their survival, the high correlation showed that bigger hospitals were associated with lower mortality. But we could not conclude that bigger hospitals caused the lower mortality. We cannot conclude that the higher survival rates were in any sense caused by the increased number of cases– in fact it could even be the other way round: better hospitals simply attracted more patients.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pelican
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 13 Feb. 2020
Edition ‏ : ‎ 1st
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241258766
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241258767
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 261 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.2 x 2.5 x 18.1 cm