000 01993 a2200181 4500
003 OSt
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008 230417b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020 _a9781544508054
050 _aQA273.6
100 _aTaleb, Nassim Nicholas
245 _aStatistical consequences of fat tails : real world preasymptotics, epistemology, and applications : papers and commentary
260 _bSTEM Academic Press
_c2020
300 _axiv, 441 p.
490 _aThe Technical Incerto Collection
520 _aThe book investigates the misapplication of conventional statistical techniques to fat tailed distributions and looks for remedies, when possible. Switching from thin tailed to fat tailed distributions requires more than “changing the color of the dress.” Traditional asymptotics deal mainly with either n=1 or n=∞, and the real world is in between, under the “laws of the medium numbers”–which vary widely across specific distributions. Both the law of large numbers and the generalized central limit mechanisms operate in highly idiosyncratic ways outside the standard Gaussian or Levy-Stable basins of convergence. A few examples: - The sample mean is rarely in line with the population mean, with effect on “naïve empiricism,” but can be sometimes be estimated via parametric methods. - The “empirical distribution” is rarely empirical. - Parameter uncertainty has compounding effects on statistical metrics. - Dimension reduction (principal components) fails. - Inequality estimators (Gini or quantile contributions) are not additive and produce wrong results. - Many “biases” found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated probability distributions. - Most of the failures of financial economics, econometrics, and behavioral economics can be attributed to using the wrong distributions. This book, the first volume of the Technical Incerto, weaves a narrative around published journal articles.
942 _2lcc
_cBK
999 _c29684
_d29684