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12:14 AM

@Silverfish: What do you mean by "mental orientation"? (I think the edit was useful regardless of the fact that there was already a MATLAB tag.)

7 hours later…

Parash Dejmar

6:50 AM

Yes, Im sorry. I created two accounts, when I forgot the password of the other one at the school. Totally my bad and I apologize, I will stack the accounts as soon as possible.

4 hours later…

Silverfish

11:05 AM

@usεr11852 By "mental orientation" - if you tell me that the following piece of code is R or Python or whatever, then I can get my brain into "R mode" or "Python mode" and can start reading it straight away. Whereas if you don't tell me, I tend to scan through trying to work out what language it is before I can actually mentally process it.

I imagine people who are more "multilingual" than me can process code of any language, without my mental contortions over "what language is this?"!

Glen_b

11:22 AM

@Silverfish I initially have a similar issue between R and Python -- and sometimes it even takes me a while to spot the difference between R and Matlab (sometimes code can look a bit like either). It can be a little confusing if you start trying to read code one way before realizing it's actually in another language.

2 hours later…

amoeba

12:57 PM

@Silverfish @gung I agree that it's useful to have language mentioned before the code block, but I find the edit that inserts "Octave" (and not "Matlab" or at least "Octave/Matlab") a bit weird and less helpful than it could be.

1 hour later…

Stephan Kolassa

2:16 PM

Comedian John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) on p-hacking, misleading press releases and other problems in studies (often as misreported by the media): youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw&app=desktop

whuber

2:40 PM

@StephanKolassa It's worth watching every minute of it. Brilliant presentation.

Silverfish

@amoeba Indeed - but I don't know the differences well enough to know if it would work in Matlab so didn't want to amend the edit. I was able to verify that the original was done in Octave and hoped that Matlab users would have a better grasp than me what that would imply for reading/executing it!

amoeba

3:04 PM

@Silverfish "I was able to verify that the original was done in Octave" -- hmm, how could you verify that?

Silverfish

3:25 PM

@amoeba I wouldn't have approved the edit if I wasn't sure. The OP had included a dropbox link with all of the files for the project, there were Octave setup files there IIRC.

3 hours later…

Erosennin

6:28 PM

@Glen_b: Thanks for that link in my question. Should I delete the duplicate question? Not sure what standard practice is here

Heisenberg

6:45 PM

what's the name for sample size / number of parameters, etc.

are they statistics?

Erosennin

Statistic

A statistic (singular) is a single measure of some attribute of a sample (e.g., its arithmetic mean value). It is calculated by applying a function (statistical algorithm) to the values of the items of the sample, which are known together as a set of data. More formally, statistical theory defines a statistic as a function of a sample where the function itself is independent of the sample's distribution; that is, the function can be stated before realization of the data. The term statistic is used both for the function and for the value of the function on a given sample. A statistic is distinct...

Heisenberg

7:06 PM

sample size is clearly a function of a sample, hence a statistic

what's "the number of parameters"?

What I'm trying to do is to write "In the first part of my code here, I compute various XX_things, e.g. sample size, number of parameters, that will be used later in the code."

Erosennin

not sure if I understand. Do you compute the number of parameters? :)

General Abrial

@StephanKolassa You mean I've been huffing fart fumes for no reduction to cancer risk!? Who could have foreseen that!?

Heisenberg

You're right -- not really compute. More like specifying.

Erosennin

@Heisenberg: maybe you can restructure your sentence, using 'specify' and leaving out "statistics" :)

Heisenberg

So "In the first part of my code, I specify XX". What would go into XX?

Erosennin

7:16 PM

the list of what you are specifying, maybe :)

Heisenberg

Yeah, I'm looking for the name of the class of those things :), cuz I have like 10 of them

sample size, number of parameters, storage matrix, step size -- you know a bunch of "constants"

Erosennin

@Heisenberg: Well, good luck finding that word. It is not statistic, that is for sure :)

Heisenberg

@Erosennin thanks!

Stephan Kolassa

7:41 PM

@GeneralAbrial If you'll tell us exactly when you have been taking deep breaths, we can correlate that to the quality of your posts. We are data-driven around here, y'know.

@Heisenberg "Quantities"?Some of these (e.g., sample size or step size) would be called "parameters" by anyone except statisticians - "parameters" for us have a rather specialized connotation.

coffeinjunky

8:35 PM

Hi @all

gung

8:53 PM

@Heisenberg, it sounds like you're referring to what computer scientists call "globals" (especially since you are doing this at the top of a code file).

You could put, 'In the first part of my code, I specify a variety of global variables'.

2 hours later…

Glen_b

11:14 PM

@Erosennin While you can delete if you wish, there's two reasons why I would lean toward not doing so -- the first is simply that it occurred to me that you might have a slightly different question after reading the answer, and you may have wanted to modify your present question (while it has no answers there's not so much harm in doing so, though you could always ask a new one).

The second (and perhaps better) reason is that you couldn't find an answer to your question before you posted, so someone trying a similar search to yours would presumably find your post but not the other one. Finding your (now closed) duplicate then leads them to an answer to that question.

I think it's an important aspect of the site that takes a while to appreciate, but closed duplicates are actually a very useful resource, since they allow good answers to collect in fewer places and we have the various ways to ask about the issue all pointing to those good answers.

As a beginner I tended to see a closed duplicate as a bad thing, but posting what ends up being a well-asked duplicate after properly searching for answers is actually a contribution to the site because it can help the next person to a successful search rather than a failed one.

@Stephan I can't watch the youtube link (it's always region-locked, though I think there's an alternative way to see them) - but I saw it via a local cable provider when it first aired (in fact Antoni posted a question about it at the time, which he later deleted). I watched it with my daughter. I was very impressed at the standard of the presentation/discussion in the segment.

I had a few minor niggles here and there, but he's covering a complex subject in a few minutes, so the odd "well not quite" or issues with emphasis is to be expected ... and it's a satirical comedy program so it did far better than I could have hoped.

Why is fairly accurate, reasonably intelligent discussion of such a thing on TV apparently limited only to satirical comedy?

@Heisenberg some of the things that aren't statistics you might call "attributes" or "descriptors" or "dimensions" for example, perhaps after a noun to describe the specific instance, like "problem attributes", but some other things are more like control variables. You might loosely call all the statistics, dimensions and control variables arguments perhaps (akin to a list of arguments to a function, which might be any of those kinds of things).

Though you already have several good suggestions.

...

Note this migration from SO --- if it had been posted here first no doubt people here would have migrated it there

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