Stats in the Wild

By Ben Blatt

In 1964, Mosteller and Wallace published Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist. The paper used statistical analysis to try to determine if James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, or John Jay was the author of the unaccredited essays that were part of The Federalist Papers. They approached this historical mystery by using differences in word frequencies and Bayesian statistics. While controversial, similar methods have been used to investigate other authorship debates such as Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. The same can be done for sports articles. While it would certainly be easier to look at the author’s name right underneath the title than to perform a statistical analysis of authors, I thought it would be fun anyways.