May Month Book Recommendation!

📘 Ever heard of a Black Swan?

Not the ballet. Not the bird. But the statistical monster that breaks models and turns predictions into confetti.

In "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores events that are rare, unpredictable, and carry massive consequences. 

These are events we rationalize after they’ve happened—like the 2008 financial crisis, the sudden rise of the internet, or even the global pandemic.

In statistics, these are called outliers.

📖 Let’s break that down:

An outlier is a data point that significantly differs from other observations in a dataset. In simpler terms, it lies far away from the cluster of typical values.

Key characteristics of an outlier:

 🔹 It doesn’t follow the trend or pattern of the rest of the data.

 🔹 It can skew the mean, inflate the standard deviation, or distort correlation.

 🔹 It often signals either:

 🔹 A data recording error, or

 🔹 A genuinely rare phenomenon that warrants closer analysis.

And that’s where Taleb steps in—arguing that we shouldn’t discard outliers so quickly. In fact, we should be obsessing over them.

Most statistical models assume that extreme events are negligible. Taleb flips that idea: it’s not the average but the anomalies that drive history. A single rare event—a Black Swan—can render years of predictive modelling useless.

📚 So here is a book recommendation for you, which:

 🔹 Challenges your assumptions about risk, randomness, and control.

 🔹 Questions the limits of traditional statistics and forecasting.

 🔹 Brings philosophy, finance, maths, & psychology into a single, provocative argument.

 🔹 Makes you ask: What am I not seeing that could change everything?

Check out our upcoming Summer School 2025 – a live training program in empirical research methods, tailored for learners at all levels.

https://www.stats2econo.com/

📊 Statistics & Econometrics with Software (Basic & Advanced)

🗓️ June 2 – August 29