Who Ate My Lunch? Discriminant Thresholds to Reduce False Accusations

This post was kindly contributed by The SAS Training Post - go there to comment and to read the full post.

Lunch. For some workers, it’s the sweetest part of an otherwise bitter day at the grindstone. Nothing can turn that sweetness sour like going into the breakroom to discover that someone has taken your lunch and eaten it themselves.

Nothing like that ever happens here at SAS.

But if it did, I would set up a system to repeatedly collect and identify the saliva of the top suspects, and do an elegant chemical analysis. When a lunch goes missing, there’s always some residual spit on the used container.

I could develop a discriminant analysis model to identify each suspect. Then I’d score newly missing lunches with the model, flag the culprit, track them down and make them buy a box of Belgian chocolates for the person whose lunch they pilfered.

But what if I falsely accused someone who was innocent? Oh gosh. That could be an embarrassing and expensive error.

Let’s review how the discriminant analysis would look:

Continue reading “Who Ate My Lunch? Discriminant Thresholds to Reduce False Accusations”

This post was kindly contributed by The SAS Training Post - go there to comment and to read the full post.