Make statistics sexy

I’ve been enjoined to make statistics sexy. It’s really taking root in my brain.There are no easy answers in statistics; it’s a long, hard road. It’s rigorous, and honest, and that’s why I love it. Frank Harrell’s talk at NHS-R typified this. The price of truth can be very high- like binning all the data from your £1m study instead of doing what many do which is slice it into so many pieces that something looks shiny and publishing that.

At the same time there’s a lot of hype in ML and AI. There are serious minded people doing ML properly and making a real difference but there are also a lot of private companies selling the NHS snake oil in a new, fancy bottle and giving them overfit, janky, ungeneralisable models or even just selling them a pile of promises and a dashboard and leaving them with nothing.

How can the “I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that” brigade compete with the “Our data science team showed that this model increased patient flow by 17%” (but please don’t ask us about pre-existing trend, or the Hawthorne effect, or the other 8 models they deployed that didn’t do much at all).

I truly have no idea, but I’m going to have a good go at finding out. Rest assured if I discover the answer I shall write it here first 😃