Stats in the Wild

From flight stats, describing a flight that is the first leg of a two-leg itinerary I’m flying in the near future – obviously this is the sort of flight where one is interested in knowing whether it tends to be on time, because one does not like being stuck in Charlotte:

This flight has an on-time performance of 84%. Statistically, when controlling for sample size, standard deviation, and mean, this flight is on-time more often than 95% of other flights.

I didn’t realize one could control for standard deviation and mean.

(Presumably controlling for “sample size” could mean some Bayesian approach, where if there is a small amount of data for a flight they tend to give moderate predictions. This is probably not too influential as flight stats uses a sixty-day window.)