outliers

Keep Calm and Treat Outliers with Care

Keep Calm and Treat Outliers with Care

Outliers -- observations that are few in number but disproportionately affect your analysis -- can create headaches when we face time pressure to make decisions. Maybe it’s the lone beta tester who gives you brutal feedback about a product feature that you no longer have time to change. Or maybe it’s the tiny new cluster of data points that make your pretty financial model all of sudden look hideous. Whatever form they take, outlier observations force us to make critical decisions about how much we should weigh their significance...