A recent blog post on Moz by Cyrus Shepard caused quite a stir in the SEO community. This stir was rooted in part over lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation, and in ...

Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...

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, ...

John Hood explores how misinterpreting data can lead to flawed conclusions about government policies and their effectiveness.

There are a lot of SEO studies out there, but not all of them are made equal. Here's how to decide if X is really affected by Y, or merely a coincidence. Every so often the SEO community will erupt ...

Paul Kaplan: Quoting Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain famously quipped, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In the field of investments, in which we rely heavily on ...

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. – T. Sowell Correlations are often mistaken for ...

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 ...

Incrementality startup INCRMNTAL only works with inbound leads. That might sound like a humble brag, as in the company doesn’t need to market itself. But there’s a reason for it, said CEO and ...