One silver lining in the madness of the US Presidential election counting is that there are some interesting analyses floating around regarding polling and surveying and probabilities and visualisation. Take this post from Andrew Gelman’s blog, for example: Suppose our forecast in a certain state is that candidate X will win 0.52 of the two-party…
More on covid testing
There has been a massive jump in the number of covid-19 positive cases in Karnataka over the last couple of days. Today, there were 44 new cases discovered, and yesterday there were 36. This is a big jump from the average of about 15 cases per day in the preceding 4-5 days. The good news…
Surveying Income
For a long time now, I’ve been sceptical of the practice of finding out the average income in a country or state or city or locality by doing a random survey. The argument I’ve made is “whether you keep Mukesh Ambani in the sample or not makes a huge difference in your estimate”. So far,…
Why standard deviation is not a good measure of volatility
Most finance textbooks, at least the ones that are popular in Business Schools, use standard deviation as a measure of volatility of a stock price. In this post, we will examine why it is not a great idea. To put it in one line, the use of standard deviation loses information on the ordering of…