Thanks to all who responded. Looks like my pride is
intact. Since it would be unprofessional to gloat in front of my co-worker,
I will do so here: YES!!!!!!!
Most respondents agreed that the terms ‘dependent’
and ‘independent’ represent other issues in statistics and should
not be used. For the ‘dependent’ data set the suggested names were training,
developmental, calibration, and learning, with training being the most popular.
For the ‘independent’ dataset, the suggestions were validation and test,
with validation being the most popular.
Someone wondered why meteorologists use these terms.
My personal suspicion is that someone used them in a journal article a long
time ago and everyone from then on quoted them and used the same terms. There
is at least one other meteorologist in this group and he is free to disagree if
he likes. The terms also appear in one of our weather Bibles: Statistical
Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences by Dan Wilks. To be fair, he suggests
other terms in the book including development/dependent/training for the
dataset used to create the equations and independent/verification for the
dataset to test the equations.
We as a group have become more statistics-savvy in the last
few years, however, and my goal is to use statistics correctly and with the
correct terms.
Thank you all for your time.
*****************************************************************
Winifred C. Lambert Senior Scientist/Meteorologist
ENSCO, Inc.
Aerospace Sciences and Engineering Division
1980 N. Atlantic
Ave., Suite 230
Cocoa Beach, FL 32931
VOICE: 321.853.8130 FAX: 321.853.8415
EMAIL: lambert.winnie@ensco.com
AMU Quarterly Reports are available online:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/amu
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