Data & ProbabilityEnsemble Learning
The Wisdom of the Crowd
800 fairground guesses, averaged, nailed an ox's weight
Nearly 800 strangers at a fair each guessed an ox's weight, most of them wrong. Put together, they were almost exactly right. How?
You'll find out
- Why random mistakes cancel
- When a crowd turns foolish
- How machines use the same trick
Why it matters
Polls, forecasts and machine learning lean on crowds. Knowing when crowds fail keeps you from trusting the wrong one.
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