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Statistics, when used in a misleading fashion, can trick the casual observer into believing something other than what the data shows. That is, a misuse of statistics occurs when a statistical argument asserts a falsehood. In some cases, the misuse may be accidental. In others, it is purposeful and for the gain of the perpetrator.
In statistics, sampling bias is a bias in which a sample is collected in such a way that some members of the intended population have a lower or higher sampling probability than others. It results in a biased sample [ 1 ] of a population (or non-human factors) in which all individuals, or instances, were not equally likely to have been selected ...
In statistics, sampling errors are incurred when the statistical characteristics of a population are estimated from a subset, or sample, of that population. Since the sample does not include all members of the population, statistics of the sample (often known as estimators ), such as means and quartiles, generally differ from the statistics of ...
An example of how observer bias can impact on research, and how blinded protocols can impact, can be seen in the trial for an anti-psychotic drug. Researchers that know which of the subjects received the placebo and those that received the trial drugs may later report that the group that received the trial drugs had a calmer disposition, due to ...
For example, a high prevalence of disease in a study population increases positive predictive values, which will cause a bias between the prediction values and the real ones. [4] Observer selection bias occurs when the evidence presented has been pre-filtered by observers, which is so-called anthropic principle.
A distinction of sampling bias (albeit not a universally accepted one) is that it undermines the external validity of a test (the ability of its results to be generalized to the rest of the population), while selection bias mainly addresses internal validity for differences or similarities found in the sample at hand. In this sense, errors ...
For example, if a dataset of patients records their age and sex, then a researcher can consider grouping them by age and check if the illness recovery rate is correlated with age. If it does not work, then the researcher might check if it correlates with sex.
Sampling error, which occurs in sample surveys but not censuses results from the variability inherent in using a randomly selected fraction of the population for estimation. Nonsampling error, which occurs in surveys and censuses alike, is the sum of all other errors, including errors in frame construction , sample selection, data collection ...