Talk:Statistical model

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Could this be explained for the layman?

Introduction

The Introduction to this article should be generally readable by people who have little training in statistics. The Introduction was previously in need of improvement.

Then someone (Kri) made a change so that the Introduction began with this sentence: "A statistical model is a formalization of stochastic relationships between variables in the form of mathematical equations". The sentence is incomprehensible to most people, because they do not know what stochastic means. The justification for the change was that the term is "explained later in the paragraph". It is didactically awful to use a technical term and define the term later; a term should first be defined, at least intuitively, and then used.

I have reverted the change. I have also made an edit to hopefully improve clarity, as well as to correct an error (it is not necessary, or even usual, that the true model is in P). Further work is need though.
86.149.160.165 (talk) 17:02, 6 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]