Ice Cream and Shark Attacks - Quant Trader Interview Question
Difficulty: Easy
Category: Conditional Probability
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Topics: correlation, causation, statistics, confounding-variable
Problem Description
There's an observed correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks: as ice cream sales increase, so do shark attacks. This doesn't mean that eating ice cream causes shark attacks, or vice versa.
What is the most likely confounding variable explaining this spurious correlation?
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