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Re: Real-Life

To: Jim Stapleton <stapleton@stt.msu.edu>
Subject: Re: Real-Life
From: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@PDF.COM>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 14:59:18 -0700
Cc: s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030625171229.01e48868@assist.stt.msu.edu>
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Wouldn't the problems you mention be caught by reasonable plots like normal probability plots of data and residuals?

Spencer Graves

Jim Stapleton wrote:
My earlier answer wasn't "real-life", but there are certainly examples for which the distr. is a mixture of a normal and, with small probability, a distribution with prob. mass far to the right. I remember a client who had some rat swimming-time data. He came to me because some of the rats drowned, but I noticed that a few rats had very large times, so that the distr. of times seemed to be a mixture of this kind. It turned out that some rats were able to "hang" along the side of the tub, and achieve very large times. I used that example for years to motivate nonparametric methods.

One correction for my first message:  In the sentence

"Let X be a std. normal cdf with prob .999 and be 1 million with prob. 0.001. X has cdf F(x)" replace "cdf" by "random variable."
.



Jim Stapleton
Professor and Graduate Director
Dept. of Statistics and Probability
Michigan State University
517-355-9678

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