02-11-2014, 10:31 PM
Not bad for a musician. ;)
You are correct that we can chose to describe Montgomery's performance using descriptive statistics, which is why I have said that he has nominally underperformed. But there is also an element of inferential statistics involved, in that Monty's performance could be considered a sample (where the population is a hypothetically very large number of tournament trips). We are trying to answer the question of whether Monty's performance could be explained by chance or whether we think it is due to something intrinsic in his coaching style. To give you an idea, suppose we were a casino testing a pair of dice to see if they were weighted. Yeah, we could use descriptive statistics to say that 11 comes up 9% of the time (you would expect it to come 2/36 or 7.7% on average). Whether the excess of 11 rolls is due to chance or a flaw of the dice is something that can be answered statistically. Likewise you can try to answer statistically whether Monty's underperformance is due to bad luck, or if he is just a bad tournament coach.
BC
You are correct that we can chose to describe Montgomery's performance using descriptive statistics, which is why I have said that he has nominally underperformed. But there is also an element of inferential statistics involved, in that Monty's performance could be considered a sample (where the population is a hypothetically very large number of tournament trips). We are trying to answer the question of whether Monty's performance could be explained by chance or whether we think it is due to something intrinsic in his coaching style. To give you an idea, suppose we were a casino testing a pair of dice to see if they were weighted. Yeah, we could use descriptive statistics to say that 11 comes up 9% of the time (you would expect it to come 2/36 or 7.7% on average). Whether the excess of 11 rolls is due to chance or a flaw of the dice is something that can be answered statistically. Likewise you can try to answer statistically whether Monty's underperformance is due to bad luck, or if he is just a bad tournament coach.
BC