
Statistics for Engineers: Applying statistical techniques to operations (2016) - yarapavan
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2903468
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heinrichhartman
Author here. Glad to see this on HN!

This article is quite dated. I ran the Statistics for Engineers class at
various conferences over the years, and updated the material. I literally just
did a session at SRECon EMEA today [1]!

The course material is here: [https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/Statistics-
for-Engineers...](https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/Statistics-for-
Engineers/tree/master/2019-10-02-SRECon-Dublin)

Todays version includes new material about:

\- How averaging percentiles breaks down

\- How sub-sampling affects percentile calculations

\- Comparison of "mergeable aggregation methods" like HDR Histograms,
t-digest, etc.

If you liked the article, make sure to check out the github course material.
It's much broader and more up-to-date.

[1]
[https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon19emea/presentation/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon19emea/presentation/hartmann-
statistics)

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cassianoleal
Thanks for this! Any chance you'll be running this class in a way I can attend
any time in the near future in London? (I could be convinced to fly somewhere
else in Europe for a couple days though)

~~~
heinrichhartman
Most certainly yes. I am planning on proposing it again for next years
conference season. In particular SRECon EMEA 2020 in Amsterdam comes to mind.

PM me your email, and I'll put you on the mailing list.

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benogorek
Looks like a good overview but I'm surprised it didn't cover process control
charts, since they are easy to make and specifically for detecting the
situation where the world has changed in a meaningful way (e.g., a machine is
malfunctioning). The book "Understanding Variation: The key to managing chaos"
by Donald Wheeler has a cult following and exalts control charts in the
business and manufacturing world. Parts of it are a little goofy but I do
think it does a good job making a simple tool useful for practitioners.

I knew someone who loved that book and taught corporate workers to throw
literally all data into control charts. For instance, instead of doing a
t-test, just string out the data in order of the classes and see if the points
go outside the lines. I thought it was lazy, but if you're going to have one
tool then I guess you could do worse than the control chart.

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BOOSTERHIDROGEN
Any example what you mean process control chart ? Is it in sense of process
control theory ?

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analog31
This is a decent description:

[https://asq.org/quality-resources/control-chart](https://asq.org/quality-
resources/control-chart)

This is not process control in the sense of feedback control theory. It refers
to using statistics to monitor industrial processes. When people like Deming
started promoting industrial quality control, it was their intention to
provide very simple tools that any factory worker could use to monitor and
improve processes on their own or in small groups. So they favored graphical
analysis over sophisticated statistical tests. A basic control chart was easy
for anybody to produce.

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gigatexal
+1 to this. This couldn't have come at a better time as I transition into more
SRE style work and have been tasked with not only creating some dashboards but
relevant ones

