Evidence and Decisions

Statistics · Axiom Academy

Discover how probability turns observations into confident conclusions. Flip the coin 10 times and observe the results. Does anything seem unusual? Adjust the slider to see how probability divides outcomes into "likely" and "unlikely" regions. Based on your evidence (the coin flips), which decision makes more sense? The 5% threshold (often written as ) is a convention, not a rule. Explore different thresholds. We collect data and calculate how probable it would be if our assumption were true . This probability is our evidence. We set a threshold (α) for what counts as "unlikely." If our evidence is rarer than this threshold, we question the assumption. When probability says "this is unlikely under our assumption," we have grounds to reject that assumption and make informed decisions.

This is the written version of the interactive lesson above. See the full Statistics course.