Simpson’s Paradox: A Cautionary Tale in Advanced Analytics - Web Exclusive Article - Significance Magazine

Simpson’s Paradox: A Cautionary Tale in Advanced Analytics - Web Exclusive Article - Significance Magazine: As data and computational power continue to grow exponentially, analysts have gained unprecedented power to build and promulgate data-driven decision models, shifting business practice away from traditional decision making practices rooted in industry knowledge and intuition. However to paraphrase Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spiderman), with great power comes great responsibility. It is obvious that poorly or naively performed statistical analyses can yield incomplete or ambiguous answers. Phenomena such as Simpson’s Paradox illustrate the stronger point that unless used with sufficient insight and domain knowledge, even simple statistical analyses can downright mislead and motivate misguided decisions.