Southern fried XC
01-09-2011, 10:49 PM
For any of you all with some background in statistics, I was doing a small project for my AP stat class and I came across some interesting information
For almost all of the track world record progressions (world record time plotted against time), theres a really strong association. Theres a level of ambiguity to the line of best fit, but the correlation coefficient for the 10k for example is -.9876.
I think this is startling and almost counter intuitive; one would think there are apparent limits in the human body and this would suggest perhaps an exponential model would fit well but a residual plot shows nothing too striking regarding the validity of the regression.
Another thing, a residual plot shows that the 1950s-1980s were (in relative terms) the most successful years of track and field; records set in those years deviated from the line of best fit by around -10 seconds.
If you want the data (its a bit of a hassle to look at each progression), let me know
For almost all of the track world record progressions (world record time plotted against time), theres a really strong association. Theres a level of ambiguity to the line of best fit, but the correlation coefficient for the 10k for example is -.9876.
I think this is startling and almost counter intuitive; one would think there are apparent limits in the human body and this would suggest perhaps an exponential model would fit well but a residual plot shows nothing too striking regarding the validity of the regression.
Another thing, a residual plot shows that the 1950s-1980s were (in relative terms) the most successful years of track and field; records set in those years deviated from the line of best fit by around -10 seconds.
If you want the data (its a bit of a hassle to look at each progression), let me know