From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference
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Skepticism about data: Truman 1948 Election Poll
From the course: Machine Learning and AI Foundations: Prediction, Causation, and Statistical Inference
Skepticism about data: Truman 1948 Election Poll
- [Narrator] Data science, especially statistics, gives us tools to measure uncertainty. We encounter many of these tools in our day-to-day lives, even if it's just listening to the news or reading the newspaper. The margin of error in political polls or confidence intervals in research reports come to mind. But none of those tools help us if our data is biased. A margin of error only takes into account sampling variation. It does not help us measure bias. So if we have flawed data, we're out of luck. Few examples are as famous as the notorious "Dewey Beats Truman" headline held up proudly by Harry Truman upon Truman winning the election. So how did this happen? Political polls have always struggled with the fact that not everyone participates in voting. As Bud Roper, son of the polling pioneer Elmo Roper, put it in an interview in the LA Times, "I don't think the polls were wrong "in terms of measuring national…
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