AI engineering glossary · Probability
What is survivorship bias?
Survivorship bias: A distortion from looking only at cases that made it through some selection process while ignoring those that dropped out, leading to overly optimistic conclusions about what causes success. It is a special case of selection bias in which failures leave no visible trace.
Survivorship bias: an example
Studying only startups that are still operating to find success factors overlooks the many that failed with the same habits.
Related terms
More Probability terms
- Systematic sampling
- Transition matrix
- Uniform distribution
- Union of events
- Variance
- Z-score
- Addition rule
- At-least-one probability
Where you learn it
Survivorship bias is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.