alt Hacker NewsAs a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released
Replies
The bureau of labor statistics publishes confidence intervals in their reports
https://www.bls.gov/jlt/jltreliability.htm Read the docs
As a physicist, I always shed a tear when looking at data without error bars.
As a data scientist/generic programmer now, I don't really see them anywhere. I remember a colleague during my postdoc saying 'don't worry, no error bars in industry' when I asked about regression with ML lol
The numbers are as good as they can get with hard manual work that goes into compiling them.
The problem is that small businesses lag by 1-2 months reporting them, so the initial number being reported is almost always irrelevant, as it mostly applies to numbers coming out of larger corporations.
If honest, the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless. Certainly, both jobs growth and jobs loss are within the CI.
What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the delta from previous years -- which, conditioning on the same collection methodology etc -- is more reliable.
The actionable piece of info is sign(delta)