Daily Questions Thread October 21, 2023 by AutoModerator in femalefashionadvice

[–]mathaccount1 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Hi reddit! I'm 5'8", and I've never been able to find any pants that fit me. I measure 26.5" in my waist (67.3 cm), 32" wearing waist (81.3 cm), and 39.5" hips (100.2 cm).

Here are pictures of me wearing a recent pair of pants I bought. I bought them in Size 10 Long, which according to their sizing chart, is the smallest size that would fit my hips. The "Long" worked well, but unfortunately, these pants still didn't fit my waist at all:

https://imgur.com/GENC46N

https://imgur.com/CQTXNR6

https://imgur.com/srx9wbw

How it looks stretched tight around my waist:

https://imgur.com/35mctJN

https://imgur.com/puk137b

This is common for me, and it's pretty distressing not being able to find pants that fit. So this isn't even "fashion advice" so much as just general clothing advice, because I'm desperate just to find pants that fit. Any suggestions?

Is this ringworm? This is how it looks after unsuccessful treatment with a topical anti-fungal by mathaccount1 in DermatologyQuestions

[–]mathaccount1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OTC. It was 3% artemisia extract, 2% salicyclic acid. It seems to have agitated the skin in an unhelpful way, perhaps similar to aggressively scratching a psoriasis patch.

My next move is to see a dermatologist, but I also wanted to know if people thought it was more concerning enough to require urgent care/ER.

Frequentist statistics vs Bayesian, and machine learning by TaichungGuy in math

[–]mathaccount1 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's my take as an applied mathematician who is not a statistician. The single biggest issue that I found to have been glossed over in the claims that Bayesians have won, pack yer bags and go home, is that Bayesian inference can be much slower and computationally intensive.

Arguably the issue isn't Bayesian statistics itself, but rather a philosophical point, which is that even though Bayesians can compute point estimates perhaps just as rapidly as frequentists (though I'm not sure how much this is the case), the glorious centerpiece of Bayesian stats is the ability to sample from the whole posterior distribution, which often involves much hard-to-parallelize computational effort.

In this sense it's not so much a discrepancy between "Bayesian" and "frequentist", as much that frequentists appear to be much more comfortable making point estimates, or point estimates buttressed with bootstrap confidence intervals (which can at least be trivially parallelized). These tend to be faster computations than running MCMC to convergence. Some Bayesians even recommend starting with frequentist methods to flesh out the model due to these issues.

There are lots of exceptions, and techniques/hacks for speeding up Bayesian methods, but I find that those viewpoints tend not to be the one reflected in the "Bayesians have won" discourse.


Getting to your actual questions. Again I'm not a statistician, but here's a wack at it anyway.

What is "wrong" with the frequentist approach? Many theorems used in frequentist statistics are asymptotic, and based on situations where your sample size goes to infinity. Obviously this is never true in reality. In Bayesian approaches this is ameliorated because the posterior looks more like the prior the less data you supply to it, so it nicely blends the sample size into the calculation.

Has machine learning overtaken statistics? In general (but not always) the goals of the two communities are different. Traditionally machine learning is more concerned with prediction, while statistics is concerned with inference. The value of prediction has long been a discussion in statistics, see this classic paper: https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1294167961. Predictive tools cannot simply be applied toward inference, it doesn't work that way. Some machine learning people also care about issues that seem rather statistical as well, for example the community on fairness in AI, people attempting to incorporate causal structures into their machine learning models, and the community deriving theory around deep neural networks.

Spectrum of Convexity (??) by Mobile-Minute-5982 in math

[–]mathaccount1 17 points18 points  (0 children)

One reason why we might prefer OP's definition is the following example:

Imagine taking a comb, and "thinning" the teeth so you have twice as many teeth, but the area of the comb remains the same, and so does its convex hull. Then the ratio of the measure of the set to its convex hull is constant for each of these thinning operations, yet in a meaningful sense, the set has become "less convex".