Probably Overthinking It: A blog about data science and bayesian statistics

Faculty Lead: Allen Downey

Objectives

Probably Overthinking It is a venue for my articles on data science and Bayesian statistics.  The articles are meant to demonstrate the tools of exploratory data analysis and visualization, and how they are implemented in Python.  My goal is to show students and external audiences a process for using data to answer questions and guide decision making under uncertainty.  Many articles use Bayesian statistics, which is an increasingly popular topic, but one that many people find hard to approach.  I provide simple examples to help readers understand the important ideas and learn to apply the methods to other problems. 

Examples

Using data from the General Social Survey, I plot religious affiliation by decade of birth.  Among young adults, people with no religious affiliation will soon outnumber Catholics and Protestants.

A chart showing the religious affiliations of people according to their birth year

Women in the United States have been marrying later for several generations. If current patterns continue, 30-40% of women born after 1980 will never marry.

A photo of a graph that shows Women in the US have been marrying later for several generations

Probably Overthinking It

A blog by Dr. Allen Downey about data science, bayesian statistics and other ideas.

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