DonFerrari said:
Not if you make a balance in the adjustments... some up, some down, and you can always adjust when you have more data, like they do now... but in math, its wrong to put numbers of significance above your margin of error... Lets say you have a scale (analog) that measure up to 1 pound differences... So you would measure someone 150Lbs or 151... would be acceptable to use 150.5 +- 0.5 as well... but would be totally wrong to use 150.56738 Kg because you have no way to accertain that imprecision... but I don't know much about statistics methods and if it is acceptable to use this many significance numbers. |
First, I must admit that I don't know a whole lot about statistics. That said, rounding the numbers to an arbitrary direction every time doesn't sound like a sound method, nor does it sound like a convenient one. Who could ever tell which direction to round the numbers each time? A good rule of thumb, and the only rule I know I can trust, is to round the final results only and never round any intermediate results. I suppose you could round intermediate results in some cases but it requires special care so that no accuracy is lost for the final result.
