Taming Black Swans
21 Sep 2023💡 This is a Data Dispatch post.
Taming Black Swans: Long-tailed distributions in the natural and engineered world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rE3DfeZ_jE.
A great talk by Allen Downey (of Probably Overthinking It) from this year’s SciPy conference. Allen discusses the dangers of modelling long-tailed distributions incorrectly (e.g., as lognormal), and shows several real-world examples of such distributions. He also gives some techniques for modelling them better. I’m particularly happy I came across this, as I’ve been working on some forecasting problems involving long-tailed distributions, and his talk gave me some good ideas👌.
If you’ve read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or are just generally interested in statistical modelling, then you should find this talk of interest 🦢 (sorry no black swan emojis🙃).