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8.2: What Is a Model?

  • Page ID
    8748
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    In the physical world, “models” are generally simplifications of things in the real world that nonetheless convey the essence of the thing being modeled. A model of a building conveys the structure of the building while being small and light enough to pick up with one’s hands; a model of a cell in biology is much larger than the actual thing, but again conveys the major parts of the cell and their relationships.

    In statistics, a model is meant to provide a similarly condensed description, but for data rather than for a physical structure. Like physical models, a statistical model is generally much simpler than the data being described; it is meant to capture the structure of the data as simply as possible. In both cases, we realize that the model is a convenient fiction that necessarily glosses over some of the details of the actual thing being modeled. As the statistician George Box famously said: “All models are wrong but some are useful.”

    The basic structure of a statistical model is:

    data=model+error data = model + error

    This expresses the idea that the data can be described by a statistical model, which describes what we expect to occur in the data, along with the difference between the model and the data, which we refer to as the error.


    This page titled 8.2: What Is a Model? is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Russell A. Poldrack via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.