Friday, January 30, 2009

Microbes illustrate Simpson's Paradox


An article in Science by Chauang, Rivoire, and Leibler illustrates Simpson's paradox with a microbial system. They describe the principles with the illustration above from their paper. On the right three subpopulations undergo decreases in their percentage of green, but because of unequal weighting of the subpopulations the global population undergoes an increase.

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