Question: How do you work - apart from maths do you use probability - percentages or does it all come down to chance?
Asked by Tesla_Voltage to Liz on 21 Jun 2017.
I do use probabilities, and in lots of different ways.
I put probabilities that other scientists have worked out into my models of disease spread. For example, scientists did an experiment to see what probability of people become sick with norovirus again 6 months after having it for the first time. I use this probability in my work.
I also produce probabilities, so for example the result of my work might be an estimate of whether something will happen, and how likely it is to happen. Probability, and uncertainty, is a big part of statistics and of my work.
My graduate work was all in biostatistics. We use probability as part of statistical analysis all of the time. What is the chance that this epidemic get worse in the next week? What is the probability that an outbreak in one region or country will spread to another area? We’ve looked at this for several different diseases from the 2009 pandemic influenza strain spreading out of Mexico to Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) spreading of out of the affected Middle East region.
I didn’t study statistics at school – at all. I don’t know if that has changed by now in the US (where I went to school) but I’m really happy to see statistics and probability and statistics taught in schools in the UK. My 11 year old has already started to look at presenting data in histograms.