On Thu, 3 Apr 2014 06:26:19 -0700 (PDT), Pavel314
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:08:26 AM UTC-4, micky wrote:
OT Unless the percentages match, no such thing as a statistical dead
heat

I've wondered about this off and on, and I once asked on another
newsgroup, but until today, I've never remembered to google it.

http://iase-web.org/documents/papers/isi53/292.pdf

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...ad.php?t=30816

I do a lot of statistical analysis at work. Crunching the numbers is the easy part; explaining the results in terms that non-statisticians will understand is difficult. I agree that "statistical dead heat" is a misleading phrase

Okay, we agree on that.

but it gets the point across to people

No it doesn't. It's misleading, like you said.

who don't understand standard deviations, confidence intervals and sampling techniques.

If you want to get the point across without using fancy words, say
"Smith is probably ahead now, but because we didn't poll every person,
Jones might actually be ahead."

Using the example from your other post, you could say " There's an 80%**
chance that Smith is ahead now and a 20% chance that he's behind.

How's that?

**Whatever the number really is. And maybe I should have included a
1% chance they were tied. I don't know what the chances are for that.


Paul