Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

I often teach in my statistics class that correlation should not be confused with causation. That is, observing that two variables move together does not necessarily mean that one variable caused the ...

In traditional decision making, the metrics that impact the bottom line will almost always take precedence over the underlying drivers of change. The reasons behind a purchase decision fade into ...

IN THE mid-1990s, an algorithm trained on hospital admission data made a surprising prediction. It said that people who presented with pneumonia were more likely to survive if they also had asthma.

Correctly distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical because it influences how treatments for illnesses are devised and tested. Also, in the context of the law, it ensures that as ...

Kwon is a Ph.D. student in health policy at Harvard University. Stuart is professor and chair in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It is human ...

A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...