Uncertainty in Statistical Modeling Explained Intuitively

One of the main goals of statistics is to help make predictions. That could be predictions about how effective a new drug is in stopping a disease, how likely a hurricane is to devastate your city, or how likely an investment is to be profitable. Intuitively, we probably get that all those predictions have some uncertainty around them: drugs don’t always work, hurricanes sometimes act unpredictably, and the stock market goes down for no apparent reason. When data scientists build models to make these types of predictions they fully appreciate that uncertainty is just a fact of life. They also appreciate that the other side of that coin is confidence in prediction accuracy. Welcome to Data Demystified. I’m Jeff Galak and in this episode we’re going to learn to intuitively understand how predictive models incorporate uncertainty. We’ll also learn what role prediction confidence has and how it is related to, but not quite the same thing as uncertainty. Link to video about forecasting hurricane paths: https://youtu.be/9VIRZyV-NsI Follow me at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-galak-768a193a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/datademystified Equipment Used for Filming: Nikon D7100: https://amzn.to/320N1FZ Softlight: https://amzn.to/2ZaXz3o Yeti Microphone: https://amzn.to/2ZTXznB iPad for Teleprompter: https://amzn.to/2ZSUkNh Camtasia for Video Editing: https://amzn.to/2ZRPeAV