Carolina QuotesAll models are wrong; some models are useful.
George E. P. Box Connected to the Carolinas
Source
For instance in George E. P. Box, William Hunter and Stuart Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, 2005, page 440. See "All models are wrong".
- year
- 2005
Cite this record
“All models are wrong; some models are useful.” George E. P. Box. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-9FA63F854E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/9fa63f854e
More from George E. P. Box
I want to tell you how I got to be a statistician. I was, of course, born in England and in 1939... when war broke out in September of that year, although I was close to getting a degree in Chemistry, I abandoned that and joined the Army. They put me in the Engineers (and when I see a bridge I still catch myself calculating where I would put the charges to blow it up). Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas. Some of England's best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant. The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician. He said "we can't get one, what do you know about it?" I said "Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn't understand it". He said "You've read the book so you better do it", so I said, "Yes sir"
An innovative discussion of building empirical models and the fitting of surfaces to data. Introduces the general philosophy of response surface methodology, and details least squares for response surface work, factorial designs at two levels, fitting second-order models, adequacy of estimation and the use of transformation, occurrence and elucidation of ridge systems, and more. Some results are presented for the first time. Includes real-life exercises, nearly all with solutions.
A man in daily muddy contact with field experiments could not be expected to have much faith in any direct assumption of independently distributed normal errors.