Well, the danger is really not the statistical test per se, it the interpretation of the statistical test. Yesterday I tweeted (@deanabb) this fun factoid: “Redskins predict Romney wins POTUS #overfit. if Redskins lose home game before election => challenger wins (17/18) http://www.usatoday.com/story/gameon/2012/11/04/nfl-redskins-rule-romney/1681023/” I frankly had never heard of this “rule” before and found it quite striking. It even has its own Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redskins_Rule). For those of us in the predictive analytics or data mining community, and those of us who use statistical tests to help out interpreting small data, 17/18 we know is a hugely significant finding. This
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