Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

Stop falling for misleading headlines. Understand the difference between correlation and causation, and learn how researchers prove real scientific facts.

I often teach in my statistics class that correlation should not be confused with causation. That is, observing that two variables move together does not necessarily mean that one variable caused the ...

The rooster thinks he summons the sun because the sunrise always follows his crow. Correlation, at its worst, is a very confident rooster. For decades, our data economy has run on the same illusion: ...

Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...

One of the most interesting things to talk about in math classes is the difference between correlation and causation. For example, there is a correlation between the number of movies Elijah Wood ...

If you read a lot, like me, you might notice almost daily there’s a new study that contradicts some earlier research. Something causes cancer — then it’s good for you. You know the drill. What’s going ...

IN THE mid-1990s, an algorithm trained on hospital admission data made a surprising prediction. It said that people who presented with pneumonia were more likely to survive if they also had asthma.