Philosophy

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

-Benjamin Disraeli

The above quote, popularized by Mark Twain, expresses the frustration experienced by many at the malleability and confounding nature of statistics. They can be used to confuse, browbeat, persuade, and warn.

The problem with statistics is not so much with statistics itself, but with the general ignorance of them in the general community.

Statistical tools in the wrong hands can result in the worst kind of lies: seemingly irrefutable facts created from a legitimate database. Numbers must be treated with care and precision, so that they do not fool us into believing we have found diamonds, when in fact all that we see is shattered glass.

Our philosophy is to find in the numbers the truths that they hold, hidden in the myriad of false leads that any dataset contains. This requires treating data with respect: taking care when filtering outliers, or violating canonical assumptions, or when applying a new technique.

We call this "listening to the data." Sometimes it doesn't say what we thought or hoped it would. But every data set has a story to tell.