July 21, 2014
Stat of the Week Competition Discussion: July 19 – 25 2014
If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!
Rachel Cunliffe is the co-director of CensusAtSchool and currently consults for the Department of Statistics. Her interests include statistical literacy, social media and blogging. See all posts by Rachel Cunliffe »
In reply to Sammie Jia’s question about the two Malaysian Airlines tragedies:
There isn’t any reasonable way to compute (or, really, define) the probability of either event. We can talk about the probability of them happening to the same airline, given that they both happened.
There are 240 airlines in the IATA, so a rough, order-of-magnitude probability if the airline had nothing to do with it would be 1 in 240. The probability should probably be a bit higher than this to allow for different numbers of flights by different airlines.
10 years ago