Talk:Mathematical assumption

Should this article exist?

I question the need for this page to exist. But if it remains in wikipedia it needs much further editing and broadening of scope. Skbkekas (talk) 02:15, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

This concept must be kept in wikipedia since many people easily tends to abuse mathematical assumptions in Statistics to build their methodoliogies. We must rigorously distinguish it from Statistical hypothesis.(Yuanfangdelang | talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:50, 27 January 2010 (UTC).

If this phrase has some special mean in statistics that not the obvious one then either expand the article to say something nontrivial about it or move the article to wiktionary per WP:DICDEF. If it simply means an assumption in mathematics then Skbkekas is correct and just delete it.--RDBury (talk) 17:41, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

As far as I understand, the proposed concept makes sense (if at all) in some statistical context only. If so then this article should be merged into an appropriate statistical article (if not deleted at all). Boris Tsirelson (talk) 21:06, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

You have to consider the title, not the content. Of course in this case there isn't much content to worry about anyway. It doesn't make sense for mathematical assumption to point to a statistics article. The only reasonable place I can think of it to point is axiom, which would be relatively harmless but not particularly useful. I'm torn between boldly redirecting to axiom, and taking it to AfD (author removed my PROD without explanation; this is legal but not especially good form). --Trovatore (talk) 21:41, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I see above that the author commented here; my apologies for saying the PROD removal was unexplained. An edit summary would have been good too, but the author appears to be new. --Trovatore (talk) 21:45, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

If the topic us meaningful at all, it shouldn't be under the name "mathematical assumption". There appears to be an attempt to distinguish a hypothesis being tested from the other assumptions that may be made for the model used in formulating an hypothesis test. Judging from the author's other contributions, which are also poorly explained, there may also be an attempt to distinguish assumptions made in what might be called the predictive structure of a statistical model from other distributional assumptions. If there is actually a point to be made, then it would be better placed in one of the existing articles. As I recall, there were recent changes that aimed to raise the importance of the "underlying assumptions" involved in statistical tests. At prrsent, I would support taking this to AfD. Melcombe (talk) 10:58, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

It's been redirected to axiom. That isn't perfect, as arguably you can assume something without taking it as an axiom, but I think it's close enough that I personally don't want to bother with AfD. But go ahead if you like. --Trovatore (talk) 21:02, 28 January 2010 (UTC)