Tim, here is a link to an excellent series of (74) posts that addresses all of the criticism of the Lancet study. It will be more productive if you have a look at them rather than trading posts with me ad infinitum.
timlambert.org
I actually did find one post critical of the Lancet analysis by someone (Pierre Sprey) who appears to have a good knowledge of statistics. He (Sprey) states:
..they (Roberts et al) could have saved themselves a lot of trouble had they discarded the straitjacket of Gaussian distribution in favor of a more practical statistical approach..
So how to escape the Gaussian distortion?
"The answer lies in quite simple statistical techniques called 'distribution free' or 'non parametric' methods. These make the obviously more reasonable assumption that one hasn't the foggiest notion of what the distribution of the data should be, especially when considering data one hasn't seen -- before one is prepared to let the data define its own distribution, whatever that unusual shape may be, rather than forcing it into the bell curve. The relatively simple computational methods used in this approach basically treat each point as if it has the same weight as any other, with the happy result that outliers don't greatly exaggerate the scatter.
"So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000.) With an 80 per cent confidence interval, the lower bound is 78,000 and the upper bound is 229,000. This shift to higher excess deaths occurs because the real, as opposed to the Gaussian, distribution of the data is heavily skewed to the high side of the distribution center".
d-n-i.net
Thanks for all of your comments Tim. I'll read whatever else you post, but otherwise I'm through with this subject (probably much to the relief of LindyBill) |
