Is the old adage, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," really true?
Jennifer Priestley wanted to find out and figured a gathering of nearly 1,000 statisticians at an analytics conference would want to know, as well. So the Kennesaw State University statistics professor posed that question to attendees during her opening remarks of Analytics 2012 from Caesar’s Palace, right on the Vegas strip.
“Well, as analytical professionals, we wanted to take that a little bit further,” said Priestley, who is also the co-chair of the Analytics 2012 event. “We wanted to actually answer the question, ‘What is the probability of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?’”
To find out, Priestley developed a statistical model that is powered by responses to a series of four questions:
- Are you a member of the Royal Family? (“The sample size is very small, but it’s highly predictive,” Priestley said).
- Are you an outlier? (“For those of us that studied mathematics, statistics or engineering… yeah we are. But we’re OK with that,” Priestley said).
- Are the friends and colleagues that you’re traveling with normal? (Here, Priestley let the attendees make up their own minds.)
- Did you bring a group of graduate students with you to this conference? (“If you had to bail any of those graduate students out of jail, there was an interaction effect,” Priestley said.).
The math of the model really does work, Priestley said, and she used it to calculate the probability of her activities in Vegas staying in Vegas. She was kind enough to share her model with conference attendees so they could determine their own scores.
“I can tell you that the probability of what I do in Vegas does not stay in Vegas is very, very low,” Priestley said. Hopefully that’s the case for all of this year’s attendees at Analytics 2012.
