Skip to content

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

— George E. P. Box Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)

Another quote →

More quotes by George E. P. Box

All models are wrong; some models are useful.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)

The penalty for scientific irrelevance is, of course, that the statistician's work is ignored by the scientific community.

Science and Statistics (1976)

A man in daily muddy contact with field experiments could not be expected to have much faith in any direct assumption of independently distributed normal errors.

Science and Statistics (1976)

Statistical criteria should (1) be sensitive to change in the specific factors tested, (2) be insensitive to changes, of a magnitude likely to occur in practice, in extraneous factors.

G.E.P Box (1955)

All George E. P. Box quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George E. P. Box (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.