Quote:
Originally Posted by Snomys27
Okay this is a quick post for the actuaries on the board.,
My only exposure to statistics has been a survey in financial statistics. So I know literally the bare minimum.
In determining a winning player
I've heard a lot of people on the forum saying "you need well over X amount of hands to confidently infer Y." Often the number varies from person to person,and really seems quite arbitrary with little to no evidence to back their claims.
My Question
How is proper sample size determined? How is our population parameter determined? Finally do required sample sizes differ between live and online, if so why?
any help would be greatly appreciated.
#crush
I have a classmate that is doing his Capstone project (he just presented it in our Data Mining class for Spring) for his MS in Data Analytics. I thought about doing something similar, but the topic seems more complicated.
As far as your question directly (and I'm not expert) here is what I can provide. The population parameters are unknown, we can only do our best to estimate them. This can be done by simulation, or by collecting LOTS of data on hands played. Here where it can get ugly. First you have to define what the population is. Is it all hands played in a limit or no limit situation? Then is are we talking about high limit, low limit, number of players, etc. This is completely ignoring type of players, etc. In practice the population of interest should be clearly defined.
For example this classmate has used his presentation in two different classes and from what I can understand he is still defining variables, but has a very huge data set, if I remember correctly in the 100's of thousands of hands played.
As far as appropriate sample sizes that can easily be done if you know the margin of error you are comfortable with and once you have a sample proportion and standard error, you of course also chose the confidence level you want. In your question i assume we would be predicting the probability of player A winning.
As far as online/live. Most random number generators are not truly random, they follow an algorithm. Usually they are seeded, meaning they choose a random iteration in the algorithm to begin and simply follow on in order from there. If the generator is not seeded then someone could figure out the pattern (especially if they have inside knowledge of algorithm used). With a live game there is statistical evidence that after a deck has been shuffled 4 times (maybe its 7, but leaning towards 4, I would have to find the book to verify, but sure a simple google search would also answer) there is no real improvement in shuffling beyond that.
Well thats my two cents.