5

Thanks to this question I became aware of the fact that we have (at least) these overlapping tags:

Are "probability" and "statistics" sufficiently differentiated to keep each of those tags and eliminate or should all of these tags be made synonymous hereafter?

3
  • I'm still confused with that myself; IIRC, back when we were still in beta, I seem to have seen an agreement that we use the second tag up until it can be justified that a split is necessary. Maybe now's the time to reconsider.
    – J. M.'s torpor Mod
    Jul 14 '15 at 7:40
  • 2
    What's the difference between probability and statistics?
    – Karsten 7.
    Jul 14 '15 at 8:47
  • I'm sure the folks at Cross Validated could come up with a good justification, but I think the question for us is: does Mathematica sufficiently differential probability and statistics to warrant different tags. Offhand, I can't think of a family of functions or a MMA paradigm that falls into one category but not the other.
    – bobthechemist
    Jul 14 '15 at 13:40
9

In my opinion should be replaced by with the synonyms and . The difference between and becomes too blurred when using Mathematica to justify having them as separate tags. For example, one might want to characterize a random process (probability theory) and therefore creates a set of random data from this process and then processes this data (statistics). The difference also vanishes when using EmpiricalDistribution.

8
  • Thank you for clarifying your position.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Jul 14 '15 at 9:11
  • 1
    I have merged probability and statistics into probability-and-stats but I ran into a problem after that: probability-and-statistics is one character too long. I'll use probability-or-statistics if you do not have a better idea.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Jul 15 '15 at 5:56
  • @Mr. Wizard, "one character too long" - that's why we had the "stats" in the tag. :)
    – J. M.'s torpor Mod
    Jul 15 '15 at 7:40
  • @Guess Yeah, figured as much. Is keeping that as-is your preferred option?
    – Mr.Wizard
    Jul 15 '15 at 7:44
  • @Mr. Wizard, well, the only selling point of "or" is that "statistics" is written out in full. I could swing with that unless somebody else has a better idea.
    – J. M.'s torpor Mod
    Jul 15 '15 at 7:47
  • 2
    As a statistician I prefer having statistics spelled out rather than abbreviated. How about statistics-and-prob ? ;)
    – JimB
    Jul 15 '15 at 20:11
  • @Mr.Wizard That arbitrary character limit should just be increased by one.
    – Karsten 7.
    Jul 15 '15 at 21:43
  • @Karsten I don't have that ability, and I imagine this is a network-wide limitation and unlikely to be changed. I could also do probability--statistics with two hyphens; I don't know if that's better or worse than "-or-".
    – Mr.Wizard
    Jul 16 '15 at 0:29

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