13 March 2006

My (new) Favorite Word

Heteroskedasticity
It's a term from statistics that basically means there's something wrong with your assumptions.

To be precise, it means a sample may vary from the norm in self-selected ways not taken in to account by your model… and that’s bad. In statistics, you might assume the error term has a constant variance…This will be true if the observations of the error term are assumed to be drawn from identical distributions. Heteroskedasticity is a violation of this assumption.

Like I said, it means there's something wrong with your assumptions.

Heteroskedasticity - fun to say, and it means something interesting.

1 comment:

Dan said...

Brian Romano pointed out that if the assumptions are VERY wrong, it might be hideo-skedastic...