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Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application

Volume 12, 2025

Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance

  • Naomi Altman1 and Martin Krzywinski2
  • 1Department of Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA 2Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 12:69-87 (Volume publication date March 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on August 21, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Points of Significance is an ongoing series of short articles about statistics in that started in 2013. Its aim is to provide clear explanations of essential concepts in statistics for a nonspecialist audience. The articles favor heuristic explanations and make extensive use of simulated examples and graphical explanations, while maintaining mathematical rigor. Topics range from basic, but often misunderstood, such as uncertainty and -values, to relatively advanced, but often neglected, such as the error-in-variables problem and the curse of dimensionality. More recent articles have focused on timely topics such as modeling of epidemics, machine learning, and neural networks. In this article, we discuss the evolution of topics and details behind some of the story arcs, our approach to crafting statistical explanations and narratives, and our use of figures and numerical simulations as props for building understanding.

Keyword(s): biostatistics, education, statistical thinking
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2025-03-07
2025-06-16
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-statistics-112723-034555
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Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance
Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 12, 69 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-112723-034555
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-statistics-112723-034555
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-statistics-112723-034555
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