Mathematics desk
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March 6

Asking questions

How did yesterday's section end up empty? 32ieww (talk) 02:28, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Questions are organised by the date they are asked but on some days nobody asks any questions. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 07:12, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Can we use mathematics to predict which days are those where nobody dares to ask any questions? 148.182.26.69 (talk) 05:29, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:21, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

More seriously, couldn't there be a bot for that kind of thing? Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 09:18, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We can't make absolute predictions about how many questions will be asked on a given day. But we could gather data from the past and use it to construct a statistical model to forecast the number of questions on a future day. For example, looking back at February archive of this desk, we can see that there were 12 days with no questions, 10 days with 1 question, 2 days with 2 questions, 2 days with 3 questions and 2 days with 4 questions. At the simplest level this might lead us to forecast that on most days there will either no questions or 1 question. For a more sophisticated model, we might try to match a probability distribution to the distribution of questions. Or we could build a model that takes into account the day of the week (are questions more or less likely at weekends ?). Or if we thought the number of questions on one day might depend on the number of questions on the day before then we could test this hypothesis and possibly build a Markov process model ... Gandalf61 (talk) 09:29, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Was it empty before you came here? Count Iblis (talk) 08:58, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I checked the Mathematics desk back to January 2016 and there is no correlation between the number of questions asked and the day of the week. You can easily work out the average time between successive blank days and, from the number of questions asked over a period, the average number of questions asked each day. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 10:28, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

One method that won't work is to figure that Q's are randomly distributed to days, since they often come in "runs". That may either be because one person asks several Q's in short order, or because one Q inspires other related Q's. StuRat (talk) 15:28, 7 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Both explanations of the runs are plausible, but runs are also consistent with randomness (indeed, the absense of runs would contradict randomness). See the lead of Statistical randomness. Loraof (talk) 03:42, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, there's a flaw in the archive: when no questions are asked on March 5, the forward link from the March 4 archive goes to the current page rather than to March 6. —Tamfang (talk) 03:48, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I went to the Mathematics archive and the link from the final archive page for February did indeed link to the current desk as Tamfang says (4 March is still on the current desk). However, when I went back there the link from the final February page correctly pointed to the March archive (could this be something to do with the fact that the bot has only this morning begun archiving March?) Especially on the Humanities page you will often find that a run of questions is caused by current events. 80.5.88.48 (talk) 08:20, 8 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]