A deep dive into the causes, effects, and remedies for bias in regression models
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This pack of peanut M&Ms weighs 45 grams.
Mars Inc. has likely priced this pack to perfection. But how does Mars know how many peanut M&Ms to stuff into a 45g pack?
One could simply divide 45 by the mean weight of a peanut M&M and round to the nearest integer (duh!).
But that raises another question:
What is the mean weight of a peanut M&M?
By the end of this year, a mind-numbing 150 billion M&Ms will have poured out of Mars’s factories. Even more will be produced next year and still more in the years to come. How will you ever know the mean weight of an M&M?
By the way, who in sweet heaven is eating all those M&Ms?!
At any rate, it’s literally impossible to calculate the mean weight of an M&M — the so-called population mean.
If we cannot know it, we must estimate it, and with estimates come errors.