Survivorship bias

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Survivorship bias or survivor bias is a statistical error which results from concentrating on entities that passed a selection process over those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. Survivorship bias may lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just a coincidence, as in correlation "proves" causality.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Martin Grandjean (vector), McGeddon (picture), US Air Force (hit plot concept), CC BY-SA 4.0