| These details are great! But also too technical for me to follow immediately since I'm not a statistician. It's enough information to point me in the right direction, though. It's hard for me to express my writerly intuition, here. The key is to (1) define your target audience as concretely as possible and (2) understand what shared vocabulary you have at your disposal. Saying "Bayesean" or "gamma distribution" is going to put you out of reach of anyone non-technical. Saying "conjugate prior" or "shape parameter" is going to put you out of reach of anyone who isn't a practiced statistician. I'd aim somewhere in the middle. Technical people who aren't afraid of following a well-outlined, mathematical description of a problem they encounter regularly. "Why a gamma distribution?" would be a good footnote, for example, linking to a paper or another blog post of yours that explains it in more detail. I find the articles that do the best are ones which take a somewhat-complicated topic and explain it, step-by-step, to an intelligent, technical audience. Pretend you were giving a lecture to a room full of HN members -- all technical and versed in basic mathematics, but not practiced statisticians. Write something that is not just a one-off, but could serve as reference material months and years from now. I'm probably at the upper-end of this target audience in terms of mathematical maturity, in the sense that when you say "conjugate prior" I know what you mean but can't remember the definition off the top of my head. However, I could look it up and understand it instantly. I'd have a harder time understanding why being the conjugate prior of the exponential distribution implies that the gamma distribution is well-suited for modeling customer behavior on an e-commerce site. (I'd really like to know, though.) To this day I have people link to articles I wrote 3-4 years ago when talking about certain topics (A/B testing, viral marketing, etc.). Example: http://blog.socialcam.com/mobile-ab-testing-made-easy This isn't to say the article SocialCam linked to is something fantastic. The content is really basic stuff anyone who has taken one or two statistics classes knows. It's success is more in how it is written and explained than the content. In other words: digestibility and clarity are features. Anyhow, I'm done yammering. Nice article! I've printed out a handful of academic papers related to the topic. Cheers! |