owencb comments on Why the tails come apart - LessWrong

114 Post author: Thrasymachus 01 August 2014 10:41PM

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Comment author: StuartBuck 28 July 2014 03:58:16AM 31 points [-]

It's not just that the tails stop being correlated, it's that there can be a spurious negative correlation. In any of your scatterplots, you could slice off the top right corner (with a diagonal line running downwards to the right), and what was left above the line would look like a negative correlation. This is sometimes known as Berkson's paradox.

Comment author: owencb 14 August 2014 01:10:17PM 1 point [-]

Looks like you can get this if you cut the corner off in a box shape too, which may be more surprising.