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Importance of being uncertain

Nature Methods volume 10, pages 809–810 (2013)Cite this article

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Statistics does not tell us whether we are right. It tells us the chances of being wrong.

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Figure 1: The mean and s.d. are commonly used to characterize the location and spread of a distribution.
Figure 2: Population parameters are estimated by sampling.
Figure 3: The distribution of sample means from most distributions will be approximately normally distributed.
Figure 4: The mean (X̅), s. d. (s) and s.e.m. of three samples of increasing size drawn from the distribution in Figure 2a.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Martin Krzywinski is a staff scientist at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.,

    Martin Krzywinski

  2. Naomi Altman is a Professor of Statistics at The Pennsylvania State University.,

    Naomi Altman

Authors
  1. Martin Krzywinski
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  2. Naomi Altman
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Examples and sample calculations spreadsheet. Please note that the workbook requires that macros be enabled. (XLSM 252 kb)

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Krzywinski, M., Altman, N. Importance of being uncertain. Nat Methods 10, 809–810 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2613

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