{"id":92,"date":"2015-06-16T22:12:33","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T22:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whiskyanalysis.com\/wp\/?page_id=92"},"modified":"2015-07-19T00:02:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T04:02:15","slug":"methodology-introduction","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/whiskyanalysis.com\/index.php\/methodology-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Methodology – Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doing the sort of scientifically-valid meta-analysis envisaged here properly is a very labour intensive process. Most online “metacritic” sites are simple aggregators that just average a subset of scores on a specific topic (often of variable quality). The goal here is a lot more ambitious \u2013 to weigh the quality of evidence from multiple sources, and provide statistically valid extrapolations. I plan to do this for both quality assessment metrics, as well as underlying flavour profiles. This involves the extensive manual curation of data from numerous sources, which I have been working on for many months.<\/p>\n

As mentioned earlier, you might think that it is not possible to provide objective classifications and rankings from purely subjective data. But that too is a question that can be empirically tested using statistical means \u2013 and one that you can easily verify yourself with the right tests. Note that when it comes to a flavour assessment, I am not the first one to think of doing this. I have the advantage of building on the best scientific analysis performed to date on whisky flavour<\/a> (which I will describe on these pages). But what is new here is the meta-analysis approach I’ve taken to quantifying whisky quality. This is something I honestly did not expect to work out as well as it has, and I will need to take some pains to explain that methodology and the results in detail.<\/p>\n

Please check out the subheadings of this section for more information on how I have done the meta-analysis here, with some example of the data validations.<\/p>\n